Does recycling work? Sure! On aluminum, cardboard, and glass... but that's about it. Everything else we're "recycling," especially plastics, aren't actually being recycled with in ways that are saving the planet. In fact, every time plastic is recycled, it becomes less and less useable.

“Recycling is an industry that uses increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less,” says John Tierney, author of the New York Times Magazine story "Recycling Is Garbage." //

“If you think of the United States as a football field,” says Tierney, “all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1,000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one-inch line.”

Moreover, if we stopped recycling plastic, the savings we'd have would blow your mind. Stossel says that in his own town, $340 million would be saved a year if the recycling stopped.

Even Greenpeace admits recycling isn't actually doing what people think it is, as Stossel points out in his video.

“It’s appalling that after telling people for three decades to recycle, they don’t even apologize for all the time and money that they wasted,” said Tierney. “Instead, they have a proposal (banning plastic) that will make life even worse.”