Here’s the deal — Dayton OH is putting up some :"affordable" housing ($125K-$300K) on a parking lot. Everyone is excited because is reverses the old Joni Mitchell Song (You know — They Paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.)
Great – I’m all for it — although I’m not sure that I would call a $300K condo downtown "affordable, but thats for another day.,
What caught my eye was this graph:
A rain harvesting system enables homeowners to water their lawns with
runoff. Plastic lumber that won’t rot or destroy old growth forest is
used for decking. Used carpet headed for a landfill has been recycled
into a new nylon fiber for flooring.
First of all – There is more land covered by forest in the US today that ever in history. Sorry, tree huggers, but its true. Forest is a renewable resource. See — you plant little trees, they grow into big trees, you cut them down, use them for houses, and the like, and then you plant little trees, and they grow into big trees — etc…
However, they are using "PLASTIC" for the decks. This is supposed to save a renewable resource (wood) and use a non renewable resource (oil). How does this make any "green" sense — not that much of anything "green" really does.
OK, I believe in conservation, a clean environment,. and the rest. However lately the so called "greens" have lost it. This building houses out of plastics to save forests and using food (corn) to run cars is absurd. The result of the latter is food riots, high food costs (yes, in your supermarkets). and starving children in Africa.
Oh, I don’t know but I’ll just bet if you computed the carbon footprint of a good ole 2×4 that came from a forest, and compared it from one that was made of oil in an energy grubbing factory, my guess is that you would find God makes wood a lot better and cleaner than man.
There goes that law of unintended consequences again.
JVH
3 Responses
Awesome commentary!
Does anyone out here believe any of this? The point, that was clearly missed, is that recycling carpets and plastic bottles doesn’t just mean that put it in the blue can and a different truck picks it up from the curb. It means that the stuff also gets used. So when decks are made out of recycled plastic, no one is converting oil into fake lumber, they’re using something that would be dumped into a landfill anyway.
Plus, the “greens” aren’t really pushing the ethanol issue, Archer Daniels Midland and other agribusinesses are. From everything I’ve heard, the “greens” are pushing better efficiency and other modes. Alternative fuels is more of a bandaid that sounds green to non-“greens.”
“There is more land covered by forest in the US today that ever in history”
There is no factual basis for this statement. Sorry, but it ain’t true.