Drowning In Waste

I'm about a third of the way through Rubbish by Richard Girling, and my favorite parts so far have been the tours he's taken me on in management facilities for our three primary wastes: bathroom waste, recycled waste, and unrecycled waste. I was actually most surprised by the recycling section, because I had slightly higher hopes for what's being done in that sector.

Worry number one: Why aren't more things recyclable? This doesn't even come from the book, it just comes from looking around. Can we recycle CD jewel cases? Can we recycle plastic bread bags? Can we recycle the screw-on tops of our water bottles? In most cases, the answers I've found have been NO. WHY?? And why don't we listen to people who tell us not to buy things that aren't recyclable?

Worry number two: Why aren't things recycled more efficiently? If I have a first-edition PET bottle, never before recycled, why does it have to become a gutter in its next life? Why can't it be washed out and reused the way it is? Or at least cleaned, melted, and reused as another PET water bottle? What is the deal with making our recyclables into disposables after only a few cycles?

Worry number three: Why aren't more people worried about this? I mean...how much more room do we really have for landfills? And isn't anyone worried about this modern-day version of 'sweep it under the rug'? I've heard the argument that we can just store our garbage on the moon, or shoot it into the sun, so why get up in arms...but I've also heard the argument that it costs between $5,000-$10,000 per pound just to get something into orbit, so that doesn't really seem all that feasible of a solution. Besides which, siphoning off resources out of our closed planetary system just because we don't want to go without our chuckable water bottles seems like an awfully shortsighted idea.