Southern Progressives

National News:

Recycling in the US (and many Western countries, for that matter) is a sham. It always was.

In reality, most of the plastic placed in recycling bins were never turned into new products.

Now China has stopped taking that waste, the myth of near infinite consumption without the guilt of waste has been exposed for the lie that it always was.

That's not to say that we shouldn't aim for a sustainable circular economy. Of course we should.

But we'll need much bigger changes to make it happen.

"For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships... But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables... Waste-management companies are telling [municipalities] there is no longer a market for their recycling.

"These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.

"Most are choosing the latter.

"When [its kerbside recycling] program launched, Franklin [in New Hampshire] could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate.

"This end of recycling comes at a time when the US is creating more waste than ever. In 2015, the most recent year for which national data are available, America generated 262.4 million tons of waste, up 4.5% from 2010 and 60% from 1985."

State News:

Local News:

Note: I post this article not out of support, but so we know what we're dealing with...

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is calling the legislature back to Nashville for a special session on Aug. 21 to focus on school safety.

According to State Rep. Mark Cochran (R-Englewood), the call for the special session is in response to the tragedy that happened at Covenant School in Nashville.

“We are trying to find solutions that would hopefully prevent things like that from happening in the future,” Cochran said. “We have a couple months to look at different solutions. Frankly, the governor has called this special session so it is partially his responsibility as well to come up with some solutions as well and I expect that he will.”

Cochran believes one area of focus to help curb incidents such as the Covenant School shooting is to focus on mental health.

“Anything that I will consider voting for is removing violent individuals or dangerous individuals from society,” Cochran said. “So often we focus on the issue of guns but we need to make sure, and I believe the Republican caucus has made this pretty clear over the past couple of weeks, but we want to focus on making sure that dangerous people can’t harm society.”

He hopes to achieve that by searching through sections of the code that focus on mental health and codes that address mass violence.

“I’m not sure yet what will come of it but hopefully we can find some common ground where we are focusing specifically on mental health and closing loopholes in our code,” he noted. “There is one specifically where people are adjudicated mentally ill as a 16 or 17 year old, it is not clear on what happens to those individuals once they turn 18 as far as a background check. Those people still need to show up on background checks because nothing has magically changed just because they turned 18, so I think solutions like that are out there. But I want us to take a conservative approach and to preserve our 2nd Amendment right.”

Cochran stated that a lot of people believe a choice needs to be made between protecting others or protecting the 2nd Amendment.

“I think we have to do both because protecting 2nd Amendment liberty, I believe, is essential to protecting the next generation of children,” Cochran expressed. “To ensure their liberty is preserved is critical so we can address dangerous people without infringing upon people’s rights to bear arms and that is the conservative way of going about this. So I look forward to looking at solutions that focus on that.”

Cochran established the terms that he is looking for when it comes to any course of action the special session may present.

“Anything that I support will have to focus on dangerous individuals and protecting 2nd Amendment rights to law abiding citizens. If anything proposed does not meet that criteria then I will not support it,” he noted. “Additionally, I will not support any proposal that resembles a red flag law. Those measures lack due process and endanger the constitutional rights of our citizens.”

The Arts: