Two quotables for you today. Both are certainly counter-conventional wisdom, and both are hills I will die on.
First from Alex Chalmers and Rob Wiblin at The Works in Progress Newsletter where they write “Just bury your trash”:
Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of waste leaking chemicals and smells, blighting the land forever.
What if that picture is wrong? What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste? It turns out that for much of what we throw away, the humble landfill beats the recycling bin.
Single-use is often better
The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false.
It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases.
As Michael Munger likes to say (paraphrasing), "Stop washing your trash."
Next is from the paper, “Compulsory Schooling as a Form of Captivity: A Polemic,” by Cevin Soling and Kathryn Burrows in the journal Educational Studies as referenced by here Peter Gray.
Every weekday morning across America, millions of children are required by law to report to designated institutional facilities where they will spend much of their waking hours under systematic surveillance, movement restriction, and behavioral control. This phenomenon—compulsory schooling—has become so normalized that questioning its fundamental structure appears radical, even though the conditions it creates would be considered unacceptable in any other context involving free citizens.
Surprised, challenged, or perhaps flummoxed by either of these? Maybe your time in the institution of compulsory school included a steady stream of conditioning leading you to believe without question in both. I invite you to click through the links to learn more.
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