11 The Recycling Habits of West Egg´s Residents

11 The Recycling Habits of West Egg´s Residents The Recycling Habits of West Egg’s Residents The following appeared in a memo from the mayor of the town of the West Egg. “Two years ago, our consults predicted that West Egg’s landfill, which is used for garbage disposal, will be completely filled within 5 years. During the past 2 years, however, town residents have recycling twice as much aluminum and paper as they did in previous years. Next month, the amount of material recycled should further increase, since charges for pickup will double. Furthermore, over 90% of respondents to a recent survey said that they would do more recycling in the future. Because of our residents strong commitment to recycling, the available space in out landfill should last for considerably longer than predicted.” My Argument The memo concludes that the landfill will last considerably longer than predicted by citing the survey results and the assumption that the residents’ awareness of recycling is promoted to a large scale. But all the above rely on a series unsubstantiated assumptions, which considered together render the assertion wholly unconvincing. For the threshold problem, the mayor said the recycling have been doubled. There is no evidence to show the amount of goods residents consume everyday, so whether the recycling possesses a large proportion of it can be dubious at best. It is possible goods which are not recycled are far more than the recycled ones. Thus the landfill will, in reverse, be filled earlier than predicted. In the second place, the mayor claimed that the recycling will be doubled under the increase of pickup charge. It seems that the more charges on the pickup, the more recycling will be done. But it may be have no correlation, especially for those who have high salary and those who form the habit to throw away things they don’t need. For these “stubborn residents”, the charge rise can be meaningless at all. Even if it can do favor of promoting recycling, absence of supports make it less reliable. It is possible that the people’s resentful emotion will be released as to boycott the inappropriate measure. By then, some extreme actions such as destroy the dustbin in the street can be seen everywhere. And the people once recycled things can change their mind for the unfair treatment between them and the opposite ones. In the third place, the mayor cited a survey which support his idea perfect. As there is no information about the number of the participates and we are not informed of the degree how those people will represents overall residents, the result can not be so persuasive as respect to the statistics. What if the people who feedback a positive response are just accustomed to do so in the past 2 years, and those 10% are the people who are not willing to behave in this way and they can be more representative to the whole residents. Without any evidence to eliminate such confuse probability, how can the mayor justifiably to draw the conclusion? In sum, if the mayor want to convince us to believe his recommendation, he should provide us with more information about the average goods residents consume every day and the strong reason why the increased charge in pickup will definitely promote the recycling. Besides, in order to better evaluate the conclusion, I need more details about the participants and the method involved in the survey. The Analysis ? 1. 铝和纸品垃圾的循环利用并不能说明整体垃圾循环利用的水平;而且循环垃圾的增加也并不能说明放在填埋地的垃圾就会减少。 × 2. 作者并没有考虑填埋地使用的其他因素， 比如人口变化和周边使用同一填埋地的居民习惯。 ? 3. 对于垃圾收集的高收费不一定能减少投放在填埋地的垃圾数量，有些垃圾除了投放在填埋地别无选择。 ? 4. 回答调查的回应者的情况未必有代表性。