Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera points to a video by Penn & Teller, of all people, looking into the Greenscam around recycling waste. According to the report, the only thing that makes sense is aluminium can recycling, as aluminium has value (I suspect that’s also true of any metal).

It’s on Google Video over here (there is no embeddable thumbnail on Google Video, which is an indication of why Google had to buy YouTube )

The rest of the industry is apparently less green than pure landfill as it takes more energy to recycle anything else and only exists on subsidies. However, the subsidies are now creating an entire faux value chain - that is starting to use legal approaches to ensconce itself (its now a multi billion $ industry, based totally on subsidies). They also point out that there would be far fewer trees if we didn’t use paper, as trees are a crop like potatoes.

So why put it all up here, on a digital multimedia blog? Apart from being interesting, there are two relevant reasons:

(i) Recycling as a myth has been perpetuated by the mass media, usually without much thought, analysis or dissent . The pricking of such bubbles is only happening because new types of media are emerging to re-look at things. So next time you hear a “blogging is b/s and bloggers are *ssholes….” its worth keeping in mind. (There is a lot of b/s blogging too ogf course, but as this proves, the MSM is not the solution*)

(ii) As El Reg noted this week, Green is increasingly being brought into the whole ICT area, and there is a risk a lot of that is a similar type of scam either to get subsidies or gain competitive advantage rather than being green per se.

To be clear, being Green is good - but the Greenscam, which is typically an attempt to either use consumer (or even enterprise) guilt to extort money, or to gain public subsidies, is a distortion to the Tech / New Media market. If we were cynical (as if ), we would hypothesize that the new ICT Greenlove is more about getting additional money over and above the surplus hours, Ad funding and VC cash that the market is currently subsidized by…..

*I have a friend who is researching for a PhD thesis showing that since the 1950’s, the mass media has increasingly been subverted from an inform / educate role to an entertain / advertise role - ie its an adjunct to the consumer society, not the informed citizenry. Its apparently accelerated in the last decade or so. Compelling reading.