You feel pretty good about yourself when you separate the bottles, cans, paper, and food scraps from the rest of your garbage and place each item in the properly categorized and colored garbage bin. But is our trash compact really making a difference beyond those feelings of self-satisfaction? In the NYT Sunday Review, John Tierney provides his take on the current reign of recycling. “Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits.” (I don’t compost as often as I should, but at least most of my jokes are recycled.)