i don't see how chucking it in a hole where it will remain for hundreds of years polluting the environment is better than recycling it
Landfilling waste- in properly constructed modern landfills is not an environmental problem, rather a logistical problem (where the number of holes in the ground are running out!). Landfills these days generally don't leak gallons of leachate unlike those of old. Better still is the wastes use in waste to energy plants to generate electricity or heat. But uninformed Nimbyism impacts on the number of those plants.
The trouble with recycling is the energy and resources used in recycling is often more than that used to generate the raw product. Using glass as a case study- recycled glass needs to be washed by you (using water, and indirectly a proportion of the resource use and energy that goes into the system of water distribution), collected by the council (energy use-fuel+ resource use in their vehicles), processed at a material recycling facility (washed again, sorted, crushed- resource use, energy use), transported again to another plant that could be somewhere distant in the country, or often in another country altogether (energy use, resource use by the transport network), processed into a new product (energy use), distributed to the consumer (energy and resource use).
Virgin glass comes from melted sand- not a scarce resource. Certainly creating a product from fresh involves some of the above stages, but not all. Its worth pointing out that the above is a worst case example, better life cycle energy/resource performance can be gained by producing a low grade product that requires less sorting and processing of the material to be recycled.
I was involved in an Environment Agency investigation into possible illegal exporting of waste out of the country- it somewhat opened my eyes top the realities of recycling. A huge amount of recycled paper for instance is baled and shipped to India or China for supposed recycling. The reality is, that much of it is simply dumped in open air landfills (and those ones aren't sealed at all!). Where paper is recycled, to any grade other than low grade (i.e. newspaper) uses huge amounts of water, energy and chemicals (i.e. bleaches). Think also about all the energy used to collect and distribute the paper for recycling. On the other hand, paper can be sourced from sustainable forests, which also play their part in carbon capture and support an ecosystem.
I could go on, but won't! What we need to realise is that blind recycling of all our materials isn't necessarily as green as it is sold as. Recycling (in this country at least) is driven by a logistical need, landfill taxes, and European targets translated into government targets. It is just the government have decided the best way to sell it to the masses is to make people feel they are doing their bit for the environment (i.e. in the same way that hybrid and electric cars -generally far more polluting than petrol/diesal offerings-are missold to people). Certainly for some recycling, you are doing the right thing- but don't be unquestionably lead into it!
