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Except your gut is wrong. Recycling is not really clean. For some things maybe but not for everything (it uses far too much water).

Well, recycling might use too much energy to be clean (depending on how we get the energy), but using too much water doesn't seem a useful complaint, since cleaning and reusing water is just a matter of more energy.

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Energy which, the parent argues, comes from un-clean sources - that's the complaint. How is this complaint not "useful", as long as you don't rebut it by listing those possible energy sources which you consider "clean"? Then I might be convinced and say: "He's right, dirty water doesn't matter, since we can just clean it, using this guy's clean energy sources."

The parent was arguing that recycling processes use too much water, which implies taking in fresh water and tossing it after "use". I didn't infer that the later energy discussion was part of that, since it seemed clear that filtering or distilling the water to clean it wasn't part of the assumed cleanliness of recycling. It would, of course, make it more expensive, but reducing externalities by such means makes the price reflect the true cost better, so that's all to the good, whether or not it turns out that recycling is really a good idea for a given material.

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