Both Penn and Teller and Cracked.com have explained in detail how dumb recycling is.   We can't run out of room, percentage of landmass, it costs just as much money as producing things new, blah de blah treehuggers.  Those hippies sure are dumb, aren't they?  

Except they are completely wrong about all that, in the same smugly stupid way as people who sneer about the perfectly accurate use of the word "organic" to describe a farming method.  They do this because they are convinced that the only correct definition of "organic" is the one that refers to chemistry.  It isn't.  And if you don't take into account that some words have more than one correct definition,  and that someone who is using a word in a way you don't understand might be using a definition you are not familiar with, you wind up sounding like a pompous idiot.  If you start out with the basic premise that recycling must be dumb because hippies and/or liberals like it and everyone knows that liberals and hippies are stupid...likewise.  You will wind up outsmarting yourself and looking like an ass.

City councils and county commissions and citizen panels make decisions about recycling programs.  When they make those decisions, they look at projected costs and alternatives, including how much it costs to maintain a municipal dump or to process waste some other way.  Those figures are the only ones that matter; how much it costs to make aluminum cans or whatever new is absolutely irrelevant.   Because we are not a collective, there's not a big kitty where all our money goes, and even "government" is not monolithic.  There's national government, state government, and local government; and while there are relationships between them, local governments must make decisions based on the resources they actually have available, period, not what resources we might theoretically have available as a nation or a planet.   How much it costs to manufacture a can versus using recycled material is relevant only to the people making it, whereas how much it costs to do something with the can once it has been used is relevant to a completely different set of people, and ultimately to taxpayers.  The conflation of manufacturing costs (absorbed by business owners) with waste disposal costs (absorbed by taxpayers) as if they are coming out of the same people's pockets is a sign either of very muddled thinking or a political agenda favorable to the manufacturers.  In neither case should you trust anything else the speaker says on the subject.

Talk about available land mass and unused land is merely ridiculous.   Municipalities and counties don't have access to all of the land mass on earth.  They only have access to the land they already control...public property.  If they use it for a landfill, that means they can't use it for something else.  If they need more, they have to buy it.  That's part of the projected cost of landfills, by the way.  

Not all land is usable for landfills, either.   If your water comes from an aquifer, you do not want a landfill  sitting on top of it.  Trust me about this.

 So, if there's no more room in existing landfills, and no suitable land available nearby, the municipality has to ship trash somewhere.   That means someone else has to make decisions about aquifers, but it also means money.  Shockingly, there is no trash fairy.  If you want to ship your municipal waste somewhere, you have pay someone to take it.  You also have to pay to ship it there.   That can also mean additional air pollution, but it definitely means additional money.  

 It's true that recycling programs sometimes mean shipping recyclables somewhere, but that again is a cost figured into the plan.  In any case, it is NOT a choice between an expensive recycling program and a nice cheap landfill.   Landfills are also expensive, and they are often more expensive than they appear to be because the costs are hidden or are due to increase dramatically once current resources run out.   You can't run out of a recycling program.  You won't have to buy another one, and the operating costs are relatively stable and predictable.  Furthermore, a recycling program extends the usable lifespan of existing landfills because less trash is going into them; so not only are the costs of recycling often compared to the wrong things, the benefits are often artificially deflated.   You shouldn't be comparing recycling to landfills; you should compare waste management via recycling plus landfills over an extended period of time to waste management via landfills alone, including the projected cost of building more landfills or shipping waste elsewhere.   That's the way to do a real cost-benefit analysis.   

 If your county or municipality has a recycling program, especially if they've had one for a while, call up someone who knows about the budget and management aspects and ask what they think.   Ask how the decisions were made and what they believe the current and projected benefits are.  In other words, don't believe everything you see on TV or the Internet, even if the people saying it are usually pretty funny.  And if you don't have a local recycling program, call someone up and ask why not.