You Pay to Recycle and Other Surprising Shit

Today, I learned that recycling doesn’t make our society better off economically. In fact, recycling is something that you actually pay to do. In Michigan, on average, it costs between $6-$9 to bring a ton of garbage to a landfill. It’s so cheap that Michigan actually imports garbage from Canada. On the other hand, each household pays about $75 per year to have the privilege of putting their waste in a special blue bin that gets taken to a factory instead of a landfill. The resale value of these goods is so low that the University of Michigan recently stopped accepting glass bottles for recycling because they couldn’t find anyone who could afford to recycle it. Recycled glass bottles are worth less than nothing.

Why do we choose to participate in programs that proliferate inefficiency? What else do we believe is helping us that is actually a deadweight loss? I’ve compiled a list of 21 things that we believe are beneficial, but are actually causing harm to society.

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Well there you have it, folks. Some of these answers may have surprised you. Some may have been downright shocking. And yet, with this knowledge we are given the ability to question the information we have been taught as true.

Except the shape of the Earth. That is round. 100% unequivocally round.