Your statement implies there is absolutely no reason to recycle. (If recycling cannot be justified -- even environmentally -- why bother?) Show me the numbers, deliniating inputs and outputs, to support such a claim.
Supposedly, the main objective of recycling is to reclaim assets from our waste products instead of simply burying them. In certain cases, such as aluminum, recycling costs much less than producing it from raw materials. If the the total energy and environmental costs associated with collecting, transporting and processing waste aluminum exceed those of mining bauxite, etc., I'd be surprised, to put it mildly.
Recycling only makes sense when there's a market for it, sans government subsidies. Aluminum is one of the few places where recycling makes sense. The market supports the recycling of aluminum regardless of government intervention and subsidies. In most cases, recycling is a misuse of resources and a hidden tax so liberals and environmentalists can "feel good."
Show me the numbers, deliniating inputs and outputs, to support such a claim.
Okay. This is easy to back up. Here's a couple of minutes worth of searching.
From The Myth and Cost of Recycling...
It will cost the City of St. Marys $18.00 per ton to dispose of refuse in 2004 but would cost $50.00 per ton to get a recycler to accept it - the transportation costs are about equal. (That you have to pay a person to take "recyclable" material, rather than being paid for it, tells you immediately the value of the effort.)
From Recycling Myths...
Quite often, more energy and resources are spent than saved in the process of recycling. Municipal governments, because of the inherent shortcomings of public sector accounting and budget information, routinely underestimate the full costs of their recycling programs.
and...
Environmentalists who put their faith in government, with hardly a scrap of evidence that suggests they should, seem oblivious to these realities. To them, mountains of refuse waiting to be recycled into things people don't want at a cost they would never freely pay is not a reason to abolish mandatory recycling schemes. Instead, it gives them a reason to pass new laws that would force-feed the economy with recycled products.
From the classic Eight Great Myths of Recycling, which is full of footnotes for the skeptic...
The method of comparison I use is based on cost studies by Franklin Associates (1997), a consulting firm that studies solid waste issues on behalf of the EPA and other clients. Three programs are the focus here: disposal into landfills (but including a voluntary drop-off/buy-back recycling program), a baseline curbside recycling program, and an extensive curbside recycling program. These three approaches represent the vast majority of municipal solid waste programs across the country. In each case, Franklin assumes a city size of 250,000 and supposes that all equipment and facilities are new at the outset. The firm also assumes that the community has a broad-based municipal solid waste (MSW) service capacity, provides both residential and commercial service, and offers onceper-week curbside pickup of MSW.3 Table 2 shows the costs per ton of handling rubbish through these three alternative methods.
It is apparent from this table that, on average, curbside recycling is substantially more costly—that is, it uses far more resources—than a program in which disposal is combined with a voluntary drop-off/buy-back option. The reason: Curbside recycling of household rubbish uses huge amounts of capital and labor per pound of material recycled. Overall, curbside recycling costs run between 35 percent and 55 percent higher than the disposal option.
As one expert in the field puts it, adding curbside recycling is “like moving from once-a-week garbage collection to twice a week” (Bailey 1995, A8).
In the table shown in the report, disposal costs $104 per ton in 2002 dollars, compared to $182 for baseline recycling and $151 for extended recycling.
Most recycling has a negative economic and environmental benefit. It occurs because it makes people "feel good."