clo,
caring for our environment is a mood thing, we can feel like we are caring if we toss a foil wrapper into recycling.
The engineers that do the numbers, on whether our feel good toss of a foil wrapper helped, hurt, or broke even are very very good at their business.
Why are they so good at this - seriously you should look at the modeling stuff recovery people have in front of them, this is nothing but the best and the brightest, they have numbers on whether your foil was used to cover pizza, or to cover sterile sutures ... there is a "god bless me mentality" for throwing things in a recycle bin: some events are actually eco-good, some events are clearly eco-bad, but from my side of the pit ... ALL of this knowledge is a consequence of DEMAND not supply, and the DEMAND is from rules ... rules imposed by government.
And so we learn, we learn because government, not Bain Capital said "and here we must learn".
Government created this demand because you, I, micro, snackman and others said to government ... LEARN THIS.
Government is our bitch. We said jump. They said how high. And now we have a knowledge base.
Contrary to current public scorn, tons of really good stuff comes out of that process.