If You Do Not Believe In Recycling, You Do Not Know How to Add

A roommate of mine the other day was arguing that recycling is clearly less efficient than simply gathering more materials.

False.

I'll spare the lecture on thermodynamics, conservation of energy, and transactional energy loss, and get right to the brass tax.

To create an aluminum can you need a few things:

1. Aluminum.
2. Can making factory.
3. Transportation.

To get 1, however, requires mining, transportation of ore, storage of ore, smelting of ore, transportation of aluminum, and storage of aluminum. All these are extremely energy intensive (read: uses lots of diesel fuel really, really inefficiently) processes, with a tremendous amount of environmental impact. So. To create an aluminum can, add all those steps on before 1. above, and you have the process to go from ore to can. However. Recycling cuts out all of these steps, most importantly, the energy costs (read: dumping hydrocarbons into the atmosphere) and environmental impact (read: strip mining).

So, basically, if you cannot realize that the energy required to make a can from scratch is a many times the amount of the energy required to take an existing aluminum can, melt it, and recast it, you do not know how to add.

Well, maybe, actually, you don't understand fractions.