An urban untruth we can stop lying to ourself about would be recycling. Right now we can chose to separate our refuse in hope that we will be contributing less to the local landfill. From the regular garbage, we pull paper, plastic and aluminum and place them in separate containers.

The unsavory truth is that our garbage service recombines those elements into a single mess and takes it straight to the landfill. It’s quite an additional expense to actually recycle material and the waste management companies are not about to bear that cost themselves. Unless we are paying quite a bit more to have our waste recycled, it’s not going to happen.