5 thoughts on “This Is What Actually Happens To Our “Recycling” (Video)”
Mandatory Recycling
by Asa Janney
Dear Friends,
My wife and I have experienced 31 years of blissful marriage. We are quite compatible and get along really well except for a few moments every Thursday evening when we have a big fight over recycling. On Thursday nights I push our trash dumpster up our 100-meter, uphill driveway to the main road. She would have me separate out the aluminum cans, plastics, and paper and come back to make another trip up the driveway. The second trip involves getting out a wheelbarrow, and later putting it away, because of the weight and bulk involved. Some years ago I revolted. I tried explaining to her that newspapers are made of a natural product that won’t hurt anyone by rotting in a landfill. Glass is made from sand, one of our most abundant natural resources, and also will sit quietly in a landfill. Besides, no one is paying me to do all this. But she has been unimpressed by my arguments, so I decided to study recycling to see whether the experts could either impress her or convince me that I am wrong.
Recycling is as old as human society. In “Eight Great Myths of Recycling” Daniel Benjamin writes: “Until recently, decisions about whether to recycle or not were generally left to individuals and firms.” Now rubbish has become a matter of federal regulation.
The modern era of government involvement in waste disposal and recycling began in the spring of 1987 with the odyssey of the Mobro, a garbage barge that set off from New York with 3200 tons of ordinary trash. The barge’s original destination was a landfill in Louisiana, but its captain tried to shorten the trip by negotiating with Jones County, NC while he was under way. When he docked at Morehead City, NC before securing a contract, local officials wondered, “What’s the rush,” and refused the deal. Rumors spread that the Mobro’s cargo was hazardous; the original site in Louisiana cancelled its offer; and the Mobro sailed 6000 miles for two months vainly looking for a landfill that would take its load.
The history of recycling is filled with misinformation, beginning with this event. The physical availability of landfill capacity was not an issue here, but that’s how it was reported in the press. A live reporter on the barge said that the situation, “really dramatizes the nationwide crisis we face with garbage disposal.” Three agencies, each actually acting in its own self-interest, stepped forward to save the nation. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which had been unsuccessfully pushing household recycling, worked the event for all it was worth. An EDF official commented, “An advertising firm couldn’t have designed a better vehicle than a garbage barge.” The National Solid Waste Management Association (NSWMA), eager to promote the expansion of landfill capacity, said, “landfill capacity in North America continues to decline.” The EPA backed the notion that a crisis was upon us, announcing that the number of landfills in the US was declining.
Then the popular-press science writers got into the act. Al Gore asserted that we were running out of ways to dispose of waste. Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl wrote, “almost all the existing landfills are reaching their maximum capacity, and we are running out of places to put new ones.” These statements are simply wrong, but as a result of these and thousands of similar pronouncements, by 1995 Americans thought trash was our primary environmental problem; 77 percent said the solution was increased recycling of household rubbish.
What is the truth about landfill capacity? By the mid-1990s landfill capacity was 14 years of fill; that rose to 18 years by 2001. If we permit fills to a typical depth of 255 feet, a single landfill capable of holding all of America’s garbage in the 21st century would be only ten miles on a side. The EPA made its pronouncements even though it had recently caused the efficient scale of landfills to rise by a factor of two to four to deal with new environmental controls and safeguards. Without accounting for the effect of their own regulations, it assumed that the falling count of landfills implied a fall in capacity. In fact, capacity was rising, and EPA later corrected itself.
Government intervention in the market is another feature of this saga. For example, New Jersey decided to regulate waste hauling as a public utility out of concern for claims of price gouging by organized crime. Once the politicians were in charge, they tried to “fix the problem” by fiat and would not allow landfill costs to be passed on to consumers. This made things look better only in the very short run. With the fees that landfills could charge falling below the cost of operation, investment in landfills stopped, and the number of landfills in New Jersey fell from 331 in 1972 to 13 in 1988. New Jersey has been exporting half of its municipal garbage to Pennsylvania alone. In the end, the citizens of New Jersey have had to pay not less but more, lots more, for garbage disposal.
Pennsylvania makes an interesting contrast, as the Commonwealth has not imposed regulation on landfill and incinerator operators. Thus, market competition has kept fees below the national average. In one recent year New Jersey had two pending applications for new landfills while Pennsylvania had 31, despite the fact that New Jersey residents have been paying the highest disposal rates in the country.
Another persistent bit of misinformation is that landfills are a health hazard; the modern ones are not. The technology of sanitary landfills has been worked out since their origins in Great Britain in the 1920s. Incineration reached a peak during World War II, but landfills became the most popular disposal method over the next 25 years. While some older landfills, some of which were built on swamps, may pose some environmental problems, today’s landfills are sited and designed so that little water seeps in, and the leachate that does drain out is captured and sent to wastewater treatment plants. Little biodegradation occurs because so little oxygen gets into the fill. The EPA acknowledges that the risks to humans from modern landfills are virtually nonexistent. They are estimated to cause one case of cancer every 50 years. The estimated cancer rates for celery, pears, and lettuce are all much higher than that.
Despite the facts on landfills, environmentalists and the governments they influenced introduced widespread mandatory recycling. One of their claims was that recycling saves resources. I use the economic method to evaluate this claim — add up the values of the resources saved and subtract the values of the extra resources consumed and see whether the net value is positive. You have to be careful when you sift through the studies that purport to have used this accepted method; some add up the benefits and leave out costs. Particularly in the analysis of curbside recycling many studies leave out important elements, such as state and local subsidies and recycling’s share of overhead. Sometimes only part of the process is examined. For example, aluminum scrap delivered to a factory that makes aluminum cans is quite valuable, but this leaves out the costs of getting the scrap to the factory. Finally, some analyses engage in double-counting. Recycling often uses less energy and raw materials. However, these features are reflected in the price of recyclable materials. Pointing out these features as extra advantages double-counts them.
All the careful studies I found (e.g. Franklin Associates, 1997) determined that the value of the materials recovered from curbside recycling is far less than the extra costs of collection, transportation, sorting, and processing. Thus, selling the aluminum, paper, plastic, glass, etc. that are recoverable from household trash does not pay for recycling them. One factor that determines this result is that the avoided costs of trash disposal are low; even though households that practice curbside recycling send less trash to the landfill, it does not save much. Barbara Stevens found that the average avoided cost of landfill tipping fees was $7.00 per household per year. On the other side of the ledger, the extra cost of picking up households recyclables is high.
Consider the case of New York City, which loses money on its curbside recycling program. It has to pay extra administrators who run a continual public relations campaign to explain what to do with dozens of different products. You can recycle milk jugs but not milk cartons and index cards but not construction paper. The city has enforcement agents inspect garbage and issue tickets. But most of all, recycling requires extra collection crews and trucks. Collecting a ton of recyclable items is three times more expensive than collecting a ton of garbage because the crews pick up less material at each stop. For every ton of glass, plastic and metal that a truck delivers to a private recycler, the city currently spends $200 more than it would spend to bury the material in a landfill. This $200/ton includes paying $40/ton to private recyclers to take the materials because their processing costs exceed the eventual sales price of the recycled materials. More generally, the not-for-profit group Keep America Beautiful estimates that curbside recycling adds fifteen percent to the cost of waste disposal.
Rather than conducting this expensive experiment with curbside recycling, could the result that it is uneconomic have been predicted? I think so. People and households are economic agents. They reuse and recycle items within the home until their value is low and their cost to recycle is high. Then the item is discarded. So mandatory curbside recycling tries and fails to find value in items that households have declared worthless.
But suppose there were economies of scale so that someone who collected large amounts of a certain type of recyclable could squeeze some value from it? In that case, the private sector outside of households would have jumped on it. Indeed, it did. Before mandatory recycling was introduced, about ten percent of household trash was recycled. Much more, about 60 percent, of industrial waste was recycled because of the higher concentrations that lower the costs of recycling. This brings to mind another recycling myth: If recycling were not mandated, it would not happen. But indeed, it happens where it is economical. American industry voluntarily recycles 60 million tons of ferrous metals, seven million tons of nonferrous metals, and 30 million tons of paper, glass, and plastic per year. These amounts tower above the totals from mandatory recycling at all levels of government.
Let’s consider one more issue on curbside recycling. None of these estimates of the cost of recycling is complete because they do not account for the cost of our time to sort our trash and neatly arrange it in color-coded bins at the curb. Even the best private studies I quoted above only mention this cost without putting a value on it; the government studies either do not mention it or imply that we should donate our time as good citizens. John Tierney, author of “Recycling is Garbage,” measured the time it takes to comply with New York’s mandatory household recycling rules and put a value of $12/hour on it — “a typical janitorial wage.” At that rate, each ton collected would cost an additional $792. If you add in the rental cost of the space in a New York City home needed to store the sorted materials, the total cost of collection rises to $3000/ton. He concludes, “Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”
The claim that recycling always protects the environment is another myth. Again, you have to look at the big picture. Recycling is not just stacking your newspapers at the curb; it also involves a manufacturing process which has environmental consequences. The EPA says that twelve toxic substances are found in both virgin and recycled paper processing. Eleven of these are present at higher levels in the recycling process. Steel and aluminum processing have similar mixed results. Many studies have repeatedly found that recycling can either increase or decrease pollution; it is not uniformly good for the environment.
Add to this the pollution by the extra trucks required for curbside recycling. Los Angeles found that it had to double its trash truck fleet from 400 to 800 to pick up household recycling. Consider not only the fumes those extra 400 truck release but also the pollutants generated by processing the steel, plastics, and other materials required to build the trucks.
Consider the environmental effects of recycling some particular products. Paper is an important one. Recycling newsprint creates more water pollution than making new paper — 5000 gallons more waste water per ton. When old newsprint is recycled, every hundred tons of de-inked fiber also produces 40 tons of toxic sludge that requires special disposal. Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute said it well: “Paper is an agricultural product, made from trees grown specifically for paper production. Acting to conserve trees by recycling paper is like acting to conserve cornstalks by cutting back on corn consumption.” Moreover, Canada makes most of our virgin newsprint using clean hydroelectric power while recycling newsprint in this country increases the consumption of fossil fuels.
How about disposable diapers, which the New York Times once called the “symbol of the nation’s garbage crisis”? Systematic studies have found that disposable diapers make up about one percent of landfill contents, not the estimates of up to 25 percent that have been erroneously reported. Reusable diapers are not better for the environment. Using reusable diapers in favor of disposable consumes more than three times as much energy and produces ten times as much water pollution.
Reusing glass bottles consumes more energy than initial manufacture, because they consume heat for sterilization. Used bottles can be crushed and mixed with other materials to make aggregate, and glass is environmentally neutral in a landfill.
Some recycling supporters criticize nonreusable modern packaging as a big problem in landfills. Packaging makes up one-third of the volume of waste in landfills, but advances in packaging technology have reduced waste, not increased it, by preventing spoilage and breakage. For example, modern packaging and processing handles 1000 chickens with only seventeen pounds of packaging while recycling 2000 pounds of otherwise waste by-products into marketable products such as pet food. Although plastic packaging and fast-food containers seem wasteful, they actually reduce trash and save resources. McDonald’s Restaurant discards an average of less than two ounces of garbage per customer meal; that is less than the waste generated by a typical home meal. In Mexico City the typical household produces one-third more garbage even though it buys fewer packaged goods than an American household. Because Mexicans buy fresh foods in bulk, they throw away a large fraction that becomes spoiled or stale. Even though the number of packages entering landfills has been growing, the total weight is falling significantly. Over a recent twenty-year period the weight of discarded packaging fell by 40 percent.
Amid all the other mandated recycling goals arose a really strange one, “garbage independence.” We started to hear that a community, regardless of its size, should dispose of all its waste locally. Why should we saddle ourselves with a moral obligation to dispose of our garbage near home? Most of the goods we consume were shipped to us from factories and farms at a distance. What could be wrong with sending it out to be buried in places with open land? James DeLong, commented, “With that kind of logic, you’d have to conclude that New York City has a food crisis because it can’t grow all the vegetables its people need within the city limits, so it should turn Central Park into a farm and ration New Yorkers’ consumption of vegetables to what they can grow there.”
The image of high-income Americans picking trash is odd. Throughout history we have had trash pickers whose opportunity costs were so low that they could afford to browse through other peoples’ trash. When books were made from rags, rag picking was the profession of the lowest class. So, the private sector was engaged in voluntary recycling then, and we did not force those with valuable labor skills to engage in it.
To sum up, I believe that curbside recycling is a loser. I will not participate in it because it costs my community money. I compost my leaves and vegetable garbage because it helps my garden. I properly dispose of hazardous wastes, such as old batteries; that is not a recycling but a health-and-safety issue. When I have a worn-out lawn mower or a large amount of scrap aluminum or steel, I take it to the dump. They are accepted without charge into the recycling holding area, and aluminum and steel recycling are economic if they don’t have to bear the cost of collecting and sorting from households. So, I do not go out of my way to participate, because it is such a close call that adding in the cost of much of my time or making a special trip with my car would tip the balance against recycling.
I have read arguments that I should not think like an economist when it comes to deciding how to allocate my time among my civic-minded activities. I cannot see the logic in that. Whether I am thinking about my time at work or at leisure, I have a limited amount of it, and solving a constrained optimization problem seems like a good model to use. In earthy terms, if I have to choose between sorting my trash and showing up to teach First Day school, the latter will win every time.
I have to cut this off now. It is trash night, and I want to give a copy of this to my wife before I wheel the dumpster up the hill.
Sincerely your friend,
Asa Janney
They should trish. Like they once were back in the day. It’s do able but not cost effective for the profiteers. Govts simply need to ban plastic..period.
Mandatory Recycling
by Asa Janney
Dear Friends,
My wife and I have experienced 31 years of blissful marriage. We are quite compatible and get along really well except for a few moments every Thursday evening when we have a big fight over recycling. On Thursday nights I push our trash dumpster up our 100-meter, uphill driveway to the main road. She would have me separate out the aluminum cans, plastics, and paper and come back to make another trip up the driveway. The second trip involves getting out a wheelbarrow, and later putting it away, because of the weight and bulk involved. Some years ago I revolted. I tried explaining to her that newspapers are made of a natural product that won’t hurt anyone by rotting in a landfill. Glass is made from sand, one of our most abundant natural resources, and also will sit quietly in a landfill. Besides, no one is paying me to do all this. But she has been unimpressed by my arguments, so I decided to study recycling to see whether the experts could either impress her or convince me that I am wrong.
Recycling is as old as human society. In “Eight Great Myths of Recycling” Daniel Benjamin writes: “Until recently, decisions about whether to recycle or not were generally left to individuals and firms.” Now rubbish has become a matter of federal regulation.
The modern era of government involvement in waste disposal and recycling began in the spring of 1987 with the odyssey of the Mobro, a garbage barge that set off from New York with 3200 tons of ordinary trash. The barge’s original destination was a landfill in Louisiana, but its captain tried to shorten the trip by negotiating with Jones County, NC while he was under way. When he docked at Morehead City, NC before securing a contract, local officials wondered, “What’s the rush,” and refused the deal. Rumors spread that the Mobro’s cargo was hazardous; the original site in Louisiana cancelled its offer; and the Mobro sailed 6000 miles for two months vainly looking for a landfill that would take its load.
The history of recycling is filled with misinformation, beginning with this event. The physical availability of landfill capacity was not an issue here, but that’s how it was reported in the press. A live reporter on the barge said that the situation, “really dramatizes the nationwide crisis we face with garbage disposal.” Three agencies, each actually acting in its own self-interest, stepped forward to save the nation. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which had been unsuccessfully pushing household recycling, worked the event for all it was worth. An EDF official commented, “An advertising firm couldn’t have designed a better vehicle than a garbage barge.” The National Solid Waste Management Association (NSWMA), eager to promote the expansion of landfill capacity, said, “landfill capacity in North America continues to decline.” The EPA backed the notion that a crisis was upon us, announcing that the number of landfills in the US was declining.
Then the popular-press science writers got into the act. Al Gore asserted that we were running out of ways to dispose of waste. Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl wrote, “almost all the existing landfills are reaching their maximum capacity, and we are running out of places to put new ones.” These statements are simply wrong, but as a result of these and thousands of similar pronouncements, by 1995 Americans thought trash was our primary environmental problem; 77 percent said the solution was increased recycling of household rubbish.
What is the truth about landfill capacity? By the mid-1990s landfill capacity was 14 years of fill; that rose to 18 years by 2001. If we permit fills to a typical depth of 255 feet, a single landfill capable of holding all of America’s garbage in the 21st century would be only ten miles on a side. The EPA made its pronouncements even though it had recently caused the efficient scale of landfills to rise by a factor of two to four to deal with new environmental controls and safeguards. Without accounting for the effect of their own regulations, it assumed that the falling count of landfills implied a fall in capacity. In fact, capacity was rising, and EPA later corrected itself.
Government intervention in the market is another feature of this saga. For example, New Jersey decided to regulate waste hauling as a public utility out of concern for claims of price gouging by organized crime. Once the politicians were in charge, they tried to “fix the problem” by fiat and would not allow landfill costs to be passed on to consumers. This made things look better only in the very short run. With the fees that landfills could charge falling below the cost of operation, investment in landfills stopped, and the number of landfills in New Jersey fell from 331 in 1972 to 13 in 1988. New Jersey has been exporting half of its municipal garbage to Pennsylvania alone. In the end, the citizens of New Jersey have had to pay not less but more, lots more, for garbage disposal.
Pennsylvania makes an interesting contrast, as the Commonwealth has not imposed regulation on landfill and incinerator operators. Thus, market competition has kept fees below the national average. In one recent year New Jersey had two pending applications for new landfills while Pennsylvania had 31, despite the fact that New Jersey residents have been paying the highest disposal rates in the country.
Another persistent bit of misinformation is that landfills are a health hazard; the modern ones are not. The technology of sanitary landfills has been worked out since their origins in Great Britain in the 1920s. Incineration reached a peak during World War II, but landfills became the most popular disposal method over the next 25 years. While some older landfills, some of which were built on swamps, may pose some environmental problems, today’s landfills are sited and designed so that little water seeps in, and the leachate that does drain out is captured and sent to wastewater treatment plants. Little biodegradation occurs because so little oxygen gets into the fill. The EPA acknowledges that the risks to humans from modern landfills are virtually nonexistent. They are estimated to cause one case of cancer every 50 years. The estimated cancer rates for celery, pears, and lettuce are all much higher than that.
Despite the facts on landfills, environmentalists and the governments they influenced introduced widespread mandatory recycling. One of their claims was that recycling saves resources. I use the economic method to evaluate this claim — add up the values of the resources saved and subtract the values of the extra resources consumed and see whether the net value is positive. You have to be careful when you sift through the studies that purport to have used this accepted method; some add up the benefits and leave out costs. Particularly in the analysis of curbside recycling many studies leave out important elements, such as state and local subsidies and recycling’s share of overhead. Sometimes only part of the process is examined. For example, aluminum scrap delivered to a factory that makes aluminum cans is quite valuable, but this leaves out the costs of getting the scrap to the factory. Finally, some analyses engage in double-counting. Recycling often uses less energy and raw materials. However, these features are reflected in the price of recyclable materials. Pointing out these features as extra advantages double-counts them.
All the careful studies I found (e.g. Franklin Associates, 1997) determined that the value of the materials recovered from curbside recycling is far less than the extra costs of collection, transportation, sorting, and processing. Thus, selling the aluminum, paper, plastic, glass, etc. that are recoverable from household trash does not pay for recycling them. One factor that determines this result is that the avoided costs of trash disposal are low; even though households that practice curbside recycling send less trash to the landfill, it does not save much. Barbara Stevens found that the average avoided cost of landfill tipping fees was $7.00 per household per year. On the other side of the ledger, the extra cost of picking up households recyclables is high.
Consider the case of New York City, which loses money on its curbside recycling program. It has to pay extra administrators who run a continual public relations campaign to explain what to do with dozens of different products. You can recycle milk jugs but not milk cartons and index cards but not construction paper. The city has enforcement agents inspect garbage and issue tickets. But most of all, recycling requires extra collection crews and trucks. Collecting a ton of recyclable items is three times more expensive than collecting a ton of garbage because the crews pick up less material at each stop. For every ton of glass, plastic and metal that a truck delivers to a private recycler, the city currently spends $200 more than it would spend to bury the material in a landfill. This $200/ton includes paying $40/ton to private recyclers to take the materials because their processing costs exceed the eventual sales price of the recycled materials. More generally, the not-for-profit group Keep America Beautiful estimates that curbside recycling adds fifteen percent to the cost of waste disposal.
Rather than conducting this expensive experiment with curbside recycling, could the result that it is uneconomic have been predicted? I think so. People and households are economic agents. They reuse and recycle items within the home until their value is low and their cost to recycle is high. Then the item is discarded. So mandatory curbside recycling tries and fails to find value in items that households have declared worthless.
But suppose there were economies of scale so that someone who collected large amounts of a certain type of recyclable could squeeze some value from it? In that case, the private sector outside of households would have jumped on it. Indeed, it did. Before mandatory recycling was introduced, about ten percent of household trash was recycled. Much more, about 60 percent, of industrial waste was recycled because of the higher concentrations that lower the costs of recycling. This brings to mind another recycling myth: If recycling were not mandated, it would not happen. But indeed, it happens where it is economical. American industry voluntarily recycles 60 million tons of ferrous metals, seven million tons of nonferrous metals, and 30 million tons of paper, glass, and plastic per year. These amounts tower above the totals from mandatory recycling at all levels of government.
Let’s consider one more issue on curbside recycling. None of these estimates of the cost of recycling is complete because they do not account for the cost of our time to sort our trash and neatly arrange it in color-coded bins at the curb. Even the best private studies I quoted above only mention this cost without putting a value on it; the government studies either do not mention it or imply that we should donate our time as good citizens. John Tierney, author of “Recycling is Garbage,” measured the time it takes to comply with New York’s mandatory household recycling rules and put a value of $12/hour on it — “a typical janitorial wage.” At that rate, each ton collected would cost an additional $792. If you add in the rental cost of the space in a New York City home needed to store the sorted materials, the total cost of collection rises to $3000/ton. He concludes, “Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”
The claim that recycling always protects the environment is another myth. Again, you have to look at the big picture. Recycling is not just stacking your newspapers at the curb; it also involves a manufacturing process which has environmental consequences. The EPA says that twelve toxic substances are found in both virgin and recycled paper processing. Eleven of these are present at higher levels in the recycling process. Steel and aluminum processing have similar mixed results. Many studies have repeatedly found that recycling can either increase or decrease pollution; it is not uniformly good for the environment.
Add to this the pollution by the extra trucks required for curbside recycling. Los Angeles found that it had to double its trash truck fleet from 400 to 800 to pick up household recycling. Consider not only the fumes those extra 400 truck release but also the pollutants generated by processing the steel, plastics, and other materials required to build the trucks.
Consider the environmental effects of recycling some particular products. Paper is an important one. Recycling newsprint creates more water pollution than making new paper — 5000 gallons more waste water per ton. When old newsprint is recycled, every hundred tons of de-inked fiber also produces 40 tons of toxic sludge that requires special disposal. Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute said it well: “Paper is an agricultural product, made from trees grown specifically for paper production. Acting to conserve trees by recycling paper is like acting to conserve cornstalks by cutting back on corn consumption.” Moreover, Canada makes most of our virgin newsprint using clean hydroelectric power while recycling newsprint in this country increases the consumption of fossil fuels.
How about disposable diapers, which the New York Times once called the “symbol of the nation’s garbage crisis”? Systematic studies have found that disposable diapers make up about one percent of landfill contents, not the estimates of up to 25 percent that have been erroneously reported. Reusable diapers are not better for the environment. Using reusable diapers in favor of disposable consumes more than three times as much energy and produces ten times as much water pollution.
Reusing glass bottles consumes more energy than initial manufacture, because they consume heat for sterilization. Used bottles can be crushed and mixed with other materials to make aggregate, and glass is environmentally neutral in a landfill.
Some recycling supporters criticize nonreusable modern packaging as a big problem in landfills. Packaging makes up one-third of the volume of waste in landfills, but advances in packaging technology have reduced waste, not increased it, by preventing spoilage and breakage. For example, modern packaging and processing handles 1000 chickens with only seventeen pounds of packaging while recycling 2000 pounds of otherwise waste by-products into marketable products such as pet food. Although plastic packaging and fast-food containers seem wasteful, they actually reduce trash and save resources. McDonald’s Restaurant discards an average of less than two ounces of garbage per customer meal; that is less than the waste generated by a typical home meal. In Mexico City the typical household produces one-third more garbage even though it buys fewer packaged goods than an American household. Because Mexicans buy fresh foods in bulk, they throw away a large fraction that becomes spoiled or stale. Even though the number of packages entering landfills has been growing, the total weight is falling significantly. Over a recent twenty-year period the weight of discarded packaging fell by 40 percent.
Amid all the other mandated recycling goals arose a really strange one, “garbage independence.” We started to hear that a community, regardless of its size, should dispose of all its waste locally. Why should we saddle ourselves with a moral obligation to dispose of our garbage near home? Most of the goods we consume were shipped to us from factories and farms at a distance. What could be wrong with sending it out to be buried in places with open land? James DeLong, commented, “With that kind of logic, you’d have to conclude that New York City has a food crisis because it can’t grow all the vegetables its people need within the city limits, so it should turn Central Park into a farm and ration New Yorkers’ consumption of vegetables to what they can grow there.”
The image of high-income Americans picking trash is odd. Throughout history we have had trash pickers whose opportunity costs were so low that they could afford to browse through other peoples’ trash. When books were made from rags, rag picking was the profession of the lowest class. So, the private sector was engaged in voluntary recycling then, and we did not force those with valuable labor skills to engage in it.
To sum up, I believe that curbside recycling is a loser. I will not participate in it because it costs my community money. I compost my leaves and vegetable garbage because it helps my garden. I properly dispose of hazardous wastes, such as old batteries; that is not a recycling but a health-and-safety issue. When I have a worn-out lawn mower or a large amount of scrap aluminum or steel, I take it to the dump. They are accepted without charge into the recycling holding area, and aluminum and steel recycling are economic if they don’t have to bear the cost of collecting and sorting from households. So, I do not go out of my way to participate, because it is such a close call that adding in the cost of much of my time or making a special trip with my car would tip the balance against recycling.
I have read arguments that I should not think like an economist when it comes to deciding how to allocate my time among my civic-minded activities. I cannot see the logic in that. Whether I am thinking about my time at work or at leisure, I have a limited amount of it, and solving a constrained optimization problem seems like a good model to use. In earthy terms, if I have to choose between sorting my trash and showing up to teach First Day school, the latter will win every time.
I have to cut this off now. It is trash night, and I want to give a copy of this to my wife before I wheel the dumpster up the hill.
Sincerely your friend,
Asa Janney
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If recyclable plastic bags can be produced then all our containers should be made recyclable.
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They should trish. Like they once were back in the day. It’s do able but not cost effective for the profiteers. Govts simply need to ban plastic..period.
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Thanks for all your info, keep me posted. ________________________________
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You’re welcome trish. Good to hear from you : )
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