Eli Albert

Dr. Slifkin

English 4 CAS Period 1

May 9, 2006

 

The Recycling Blight

            The one thing that all historians can agree on, looking back on the past, is that the common consensus can be wrong. Take the example of the population crisis of 40 years ago. Leading scientists, followed by world governments and many charitable organizations, were all sure that the earth would soon be flooded with babies, many of them unwanted, and that famine and starvation were bound to follow. This movement was epitomized by a book written in 1975 by Paul Ehrlich called The Population Bomb. He predicted that humanity had passed the point of no return – that human demand was increasing while finite resources were decreasing in such a way that disaster was imminent. Nowadays, of course, the situation is far from dire – many countries are worried about sinking populations, and Ehrlich’s predictions did not come to pass (Lomborg, 30). The lesson here is that the truth may be quite different from what one’s mother, one’s neighbor, and one’s congressman says.

            This document does not intend to attack environmental efforts, nor does it propose an end to recycling. It will only show that in their current form, public municipal recycling efforts are an inefficient use of government resources and an inefficient way to help the environment. Despite what many may think, modern research and common sense (mixed with a few economic principles) can prove this with relative ease. At issue, specifically, is the opportunity cost of recycling’s government subsidies. This paper will bring up many different issues with modern recycling, including problems with curbside pickups, problems with recycling plants, problems with government mandates on cities and corporations, and the myths concerning landfills and deforestation.

            The big question is this: What would you do to save the environment? Forget about asking whether the environment needs our help our not; assume it does. Assume we must use modern technology to slow pollution and waste. Obviously, we must use our resources effectively – they aren’t free. While trying to help the environment, if we end up using more resources than we save, there is a problem. Somewhere we went wrong and forgot to check whether what we were doing actually had a tangible benefit or whether it only made us feel good. Obviously feeling good is important, but there are easier and less expensive ways. Municipal recycling does not help the environment in a way that merits the use of our tax dollars.

            Start with the basics: Merriam-Webster’s dictionary includes in its definition of recycling the industrial process that one normally thinks of, but it also discusses reuse and recovery in general (1). To elaborate: recycling is only one part of a larger effort to conserve materials and energy. Everyone knows the standard line: reduce, reuse, recycle. Reducing and reusing goods saves far more energy and materials, at any given moment and in any given place, than does municipal recycling (Pearce 2). Whenever there is an economic benefit to reuse material, any individual or group of individuals will do so (Tierney 3). Families hand down outgrown clothing, offices print on the back of scrap paper, businesses buy scrap metal. Whenever it’s cheaper to save resources, people will save resources. This is common sense. Municipal industrial recycling, that is, bringing discarded goods to a plant to remake them into new goods, only comes into play when standard reuse is no longer applicable. In effect, the municipal recycling process cannot be economically plausible. Individuals and companies already reuse and recycle anything worth saving, without government assistance. Municipal recycling only applies to goods that are unusable by any economic definition. Therefore, it makes sense that municipal recycling can only exist through government subsidies (Henderson, 1) (Ackerman 6).

            Consider Pennsylvania: by state law, any town with population greater than 5000 and with more than a certain number of people per square mile must collect citizen’s recycling house-by-house (Heinrichs 1). Jeff Bailey, in an article for the Wall Street Journal, said that adding curbside recycling is equivalent to doubling the amount of garbage pickup, in terms of transportation (Bailey A8). One can easily imagine the mushrooming expenses of curbside pickup and recycling. Where before, garbage collection involved one truck route and one system, curbside recycling adds new trucks, new routes, new workers, new organizational systems, and many costs. The national average annual cost per household of curbside collection is $31. This is the net cost, which takes into account any savings from recycling (Ackerman 2). An article from 2005 in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review highlights the problem: “…recycling -- especially curbside recycling -- isn't efficient and costs taxpayers, say some haulers, municipal officials and researchers (Heinrichs 1).” Curbside recycling is expensive, and, like most government services, we have to pay for it, whether we want to or not.

            It should be evident that curbside recycling is extremely costly, but does it benefit the community? In North Carolina, for instance, it provides more than 14,000 jobs (Henderson 1). At first, this looks good: one might have to pay extra taxes for curbside pickup, but at least that creates thousands of jobs – good government jobs – for people collecting and sorting our garbage. However, if the jobs created are government jobs, the salaries must be paid with government money, further raising our taxes. To combat this, Pennsylvania (as an example) levies extremely high taxes on its waste industry – six times as much as the average Pennsylvania industry (PWIA). Having the waste industry pay for the state’s recycling may seem ironic, but it also probably hurts the bottom line of an industry essential to any state’s functioning. That money may fund government jobs, but it likely serves to destroy non-government jobs while driving up the prices of other waste disposal methods.

            Despite its costs, the point of municipal recycling is to save resources and help the environment. A chief criticism levied against recycling critics is that they only focus on the economics, while recycling is about saving natural resources, whatever the cost (Ackerman 6). There are two problems with that statement. The first involves opportunity cost. An opportunity cost is the difference between the benefits of money when put to one use as opposed to another. Since recycling is such an expensive affair, it is likely that there are better environmental uses for our money. Instead of throwing our money at this process, we should look into cheaper and more effective ways to help the environment. The second is the environmental cost of municipal recycling.  Municipal recycling has other, non-economic liabilities. In fact, it may not be as environmentally friendly as we think.

            A 1989 government report and similar papers since then have looked into the resources used and saved by recycling as opposed to virgin processing, using paper as a good example, and found that claims of saved resources are nebulous at best. The US Office of Technology Assessment put out a 373-page report in 1989 about America’s future concerning Municipal Solid Waste. In the chapter on recycling, the report looks at paper manufacturing and paper recycling. Drawing from contemporary studies and from its own investigations, the report found that “recycled paper and board often require more fossil fuel than virgin products” (pg. 146).  This doesn’t even include the energy (human and otherwise) needed to move the waste paper to the plants, or the energy needed to sort the paper, or the time wasted by each household in making sure recyclable paper products get recycled. Purely as a manufacturing process, the benefits of recycling paper are unclear.

            Even if the recycling process uses more energy, one benefit may be that it doesn’t require the original resources that were used to make the materials. Most take as axiomatic that using these materials is a mistake, but why? Again, take trees. Despite the common misconception, there are more trees now, globally and in the US, than there were 70 years ago (Lomborg 111). The amount of forest cover worldwide is increasing, according to UN estimates (which are based on studies from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, cited below). When we use some of these trees for our newspapers and houses, we are not hurting ourselves. We are not wasting anything. When, instead, we recycle paper in a costly process that uses more energy compared to original creation, we are hurting ourselves. We are hurting anyone that could have been helped by the wasted money and wasted energy.

            This is a strong indictment of recycling, but one must take care to remember that it is municipal recycling at fault. The US government subsidizes private recycling plants after municipalities sell them their recyclables (Tierney 7). This creates a distorted market that recycling critics and supporters alike have criticized – by flooding the recyclable goods market with cheaply acquired materials, prices remain low, and nobody wins (Reed 17.2). This is similar to the government’s subsidies for farmers. Unbelievably high crop subsidies for large (read: wealthy) farmers drive down global prices, hurting third-world country growers and wasting crops stateside (Riedl 4).

            However, the government subsidizes waste industries as well (Hershkowitz, 3.1). These industries are larger and have been around longer, and consequently receive many government grants. This example of government corruption and pork barrel spending helps make an interesting point about the failure of government involvement. For example, an article written in defense of recycling in New York City for the National Resources Defense Council said that government efforts there couldn’t compete because private, unsubsidized waste haulers recovered and marketed, for a profit, 89 percent of waste paper (Hershkowitz, 3.2). The article uses this example to make the case for bigger government support and subsidization. Unfortunately, this argument completely misses the point. The private sector did perfectly fine on its own! When recycling is profitable, the government need not step in. When recycling is unprofitable, the government should not step in. All of the government subsidies and support of logging and other resource extraction industries (something environmentalists also have always lamented) are on par with municipal recycling efforts: useless.

            Perhaps it is that the very idea of garbage is unsavory, and any program to reduce it is therefore automatically welcome. Certainly, fears of landfills are a staple of the environmentalist litany (Lomborg 10). About fifteen years ago, myths concerning landfill shortages fueled a national hysteria similar to the population fears discussed above. Again, there is no problem. The only thing stopping garbage disposal prices from plummeting is government restrictions on new landfill creation. Experts in disposal and economics have estimated that our waste for the next century can be landfilled with ease (Tierney 2). In fact, many have estimated that all of the waste in the US for the 21^st century could fit in one landfill that would take up less than .009 percent of the country (Lomborg 207). This assumes that we pile the garbage 100 feet high (a conservative height) and that our garbage production continues increase exponentially (an unlikely occurrence). The fact is that America has a lot of space. Modern landfills are safe and cheap and can eventually be used for parkland. They even produce energy by trapping and converting methane gas, and are now mandated to do so (EPA 1). This eliminates their environmentally harmful side effects and benefits the economy (EPA 3). More landfilling, coupled with less recycling, would save everybody money by lowering taxes and creating (private) jobs, and it would not hurt the environment.

            The Unites States is such a wealthy, advanced country! It continues to grow and thrive, and probably will do so for some time. Its environment, our environment, is in better shape than it has been in many years. However, with such growth comes irresponsibility and unsound decisions. Could it be that our abundance of resources has made us complacent? Does the government not investigate major public programs before it taxes us for them? The bottom line is that recycling is not worth its costs. This does not mean that recycling is bad. Businesses recycle all the time; individuals reuse and reduce as a matter of course. However, economic efficiency is a far better incentive for saving resources than government mandates. The government should not fund recycling. The costs of recycling in terms of energy, time, and money are just too high. Leave us our money and we will spend it wisely for ourselves. Manufacturing has gotten more efficient than ever, disposal and space are no problem with modern landfilling, and government intervention in the matter is presumptuous and wasteful.

Works Cited

Ackerman, Frank. “Recycling: Looking beyond the bottom line.” BioCycle 38.5 (1997): 67.

Bailey, Jeff. “Waste of a Sort: Curbside Recycling Comforts the Soul, But BenefitsAre Scant.” Wall Street                 Journal, January 19, 1995.

Environmental Protection Agency, Benefits of LFG Energy. 2006. < http://www.epa.gov/lmop/benefits.htm>

FAO Production Yearbooks 1949-95, FAO 2000, 1995a, 1997c, 2001c:34.

Heinrichs, Allison. “Municipalities Seldom Break Even on Recycling.” Pittsburgh Tribune Review, October 17,     2005.

Henderson, Bruce. “Officials to Weigh Value of Recycling Program.” The Charlotte Observer, January 1, 2006.

Hershkowitz, Allen, PH.D. National Resources Defense Council, Too Good to Throw Away. 1997.

Lomborg, Bjorn. The Skeptical Environmentalist. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Pearce, Fred. “Burn Me.” New Scientist 22 (1997).

Pennsylvania Waste Industries Association, The Waste Industry and Taxes. 2005.

    < http://www.pawasteindustries.org/industry_issues_taxes_and_fees.asp>

"Recycle." Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed.  2003.

Reed, Robert and Schanzenbach, Max. Prices and Information. 1996

Riedl, Brian. “Another Year at the Federal Trough: Farm Subsidies for the Rich,  Famous, and Elected Jumped         Again in 2002.” The Heritage Foundation, May 24,             2004.

Tierney, John. "Recycling is Garbage." New York Times Magazine, June 30, 1996.

U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Facing America’s Trash: What Next

    For Municipal Solid Waste, OTA-O-424 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. October 1989).