That's only half the story they told you. After you dice, grind and melt the original material. You have to use some virgin materials as binder to get all that stuff together. The amount of virgin materials can sometimes surpass even the amount of old stuff and render the whole recycling process moot for those nasty material. That's why you should have better just burn them all in a furnace or just bury them back in the ground where they belong.
Pretty sure you’re right - there’s the concern of the resources / energy needed for recycling but also, recycling decreases the need for new materials enough to offset that.
That said, AFAIK paper and cardboard are the only thing that can be both composted and recycled, so the advice of the person you replied to is still generally good.
This is the guidance I’ve seen on the topic:
Recycle:
clean, dry paper
clean, dry cardboard
But compost:
soiled and wet paper/cardboard
pizza boxes and other similar things
paper towels
paper/cardboard egg cartons
Don’t compost (throw away if unsuitable to recycle):
glossy paper
paper with plastic attached
anything (e.g., paper towels) with cleaning chemicals or other substances unsuitable for composting on it
Things that can be composted are usually food waste or food spoiled papers not treated with chemicals. Paper is hard to recycle because it can only recycled into lower quality paper, frequently gets contaminated, and it's hard to seperate out from everything else.
Thus if something is compostable I believe it's better to compost than to recycle that same material.
My mother in law's stories. She keeps repeating these stories over and over but we've all heard them a dozen times before and then when we say, "oh, we've heard this one" she takes it as encouragement to keep going
My grandmother is like this. Then occasionally she tells some new story and we are all like, this is way more interesting why hasn't this been part of your repertoire for the past decade?
I mean hell, if we can refine dirt into raw chemicals, then theoretically we should be able to refine our trash into raw chemicals, and start the whole process over again.
I mean fuck, when you break it all down, it's all atoms and molecules right?
What makes used toilet paper any different than the carbon based molecules it's made of?
MDF pallets, according to our pallet recycling guy. Apparently normal pallets get fed into an enormous shredder and turned into garden mulch, but the glue holding the layers of MDF together gums up the works.
I'm not exactly a palette expert (I'm guessing many other readers aren't either), but what's the difference, and how can we average fools tell them apart?
The MDF ones are made of many layers of plywood, glued together. Lots of different wood shades. Looks like a sandwich. The others are actual wood, with one shade, grain and often rough edges because they're not sanded down.
Plastic is awful for recycling between cleaning and sorting. We spend a ton of resources to effectively recycle at best half the plastic that makes it to the facility.
It saddens me that many types of plastic cannot be recycled in any economic or environmentally friendly manner. ☹️
Like hell, they told us that plastic in general should last like 400 years. Well phuck, I'm only 42 years old and my fucking hairbrush is already obviously degrading.
I've cleaned my weed pipe using a couple used cigarette butts and rubbing alcohol, but yeah generally speaking they don't have much of any other valid use.