If You’re Recycling, You’re Wasting Your Time

I don’t recycle. I stopped recycling in 2001, when I lived in Ithaca, New York, and recycling was mandatory. We had to throw away our garbage in clear plastic bags so that the recycling police could make sure there was no paper or plastic in the trash, we had to pay for every single bag of trash we thew away (we called it our “garbage fine”), and — when we initially labored in good faith to comply with recycling mandates – we found it was tough to keep our small apartment clean and bug-free while piling empty cans, bottles, and boxes in the corner of our kitchen. So when we found there was a short window of time where we could go to the local landfill and get away with tossing out garbage in opaque, thick Hefty bags, we defied the law and never looked back.

Even now — as we live in the free state of Tennessee — when friends come over and ask where we put our recycling, we just say “In the trash” and revel just a tiny bit in our ancient rebellion. But now — thanks to the New York Times, of all publications — I feel vindicated. This month, John Tierney revisited his 1996 critique of recycling, and what he found was fascinating indeed (h/t AEI’s Mark J. Perry):

Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies. The mood is so gloomy that one industry veteran tried to cheer up her colleagues this summer with an article in a trade journal titled, “Recycling Is Not Dead!”

And: While politicians set higher and higher goals, the national rate of recycling has stagnated in recent years. Yes, it’s popular in affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and in cities like San Francisco, but residents of the Bronx and Houston don’t have the same fervor for sorting garbage in their spare time. The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. “If you believe recycling is good for the planet and that we need to do more of it, then there’s a crisis to confront,” says David P. Steiner, the chief executive officer of Waste Management, the largest recycler of household trash in the United States. “Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected. We need to ask ourselves: What is the goal here?”

Tierney doesn’t claim that all recycling is worthless, but he notes some rather inconvenient facts — like the mere act of rinsing off your plastic recyclables may actually increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And while it “makes sense to recycle commercial cardboard and some paper,” an EPA official said that “other materials rarely make sense, including food waste and other compostables. The zero-waste goal makes no sense at all — it’s very expensive with almost no real environmental benefit.” But do we have enough room in landfills? Yes: One of the original goals of the recycling movement was to avert a supposed crisis because there was no room left in the nation’s landfills.

But that media-inspired fear was never realistic in a country with so much open space. In reporting the 1996 article I found that all the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing. And that tiny amount of land wouldn’t be lost forever, because landfills are typically covered with grass and converted to parkland, like the Freshkills Park being created on Staten Island. The United States Open tennis tournament is played on the site of an old landfill — and one that never had the linings and other environmental safeguards required today.

Though most cities shun landfills, they have been welcomed in rural communities that reap large economic benefits (and have plenty of greenery to buffer residents from the sights and smells). Consequently, the great landfill shortage has not arrived, and neither have the shortages of raw materials that were supposed to make recycling profitable.

Tierney concludes with paragraphs rarely seen in the Times — where he compares environmentalism to *gasp* a religion. Yes, he does: Then why do so many public officials keep vowing to do more of it? Special-interest politics is one reason — pressure from green groups — but it’s also because recycling intuitively appeals to many voters: It makes people feel virtuous, especially affluent people who feel guilty about their enormous environmental footprint. It is less an ethical activity than a religious ritual, like the ones performed by Catholics to obtain indulgences for their sins. Religious rituals don’t need any practical justification for the believers who perform them voluntarily.

But many recyclers want more than just the freedom to practice their religion. They want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone else, too, with stiff fines for sinners who don’t sort properly. Seattle has become so aggressive that the city is being sued by residents who maintain that the inspectors rooting through their trash are violating their constitutional right to privacy.

And that’s exactly what started my own little rebellion. Environmentalists, I truly don’t care if you choose to waste your time composting, sorting yogurt packets, and competing with each other to see who can throw away the smallest bags of garbage. Just don’t make me join your faith.

Re: six pack plastics....

I’ve actually seen birds trapped in them, twice in 40-odd years. So, Now I cut them up. Costs me 3 seconds and makes me feeeeeel good. :-). So, it’s harmless.

Mandatory recycling programs? Complete waste of taxpayer money. Costs millions. So- it’s not harmless, at least IMO.

Recycling aluminum is cost effective, because of the massive amounts of energy involved in smelting. Ditto other metals, to a lesser extent, and glass as well. Rest of it? Total waste of money and time.

I will say that I’ve seen the results of a 5c “bottle bill” that put a deposit on cans and bottles. Surprisingly, it cut down on the the amounts of roadside litter, thus generally approving the appearance of the roads. I guess if people didn’t toss their beer cans out of the car, they didn’t toss McD’s food wrappers and such, either. Dunno - just reporting what I saw.

“Conservatism is all about being good stewards of your environment.”

As a conservative, I believe in conserving resources whenever reasonable and not unnecessarily wasting resources. I turn off the lights when I don’t use them. I cool things before refrigerating or freezing them. I do a dozen things every day like this that save energy and resources (and money), and yet I never deprive myself of anything. I simply don’t believe in waste. After all, I’m a conservative, which, believe or not, means one who conserves things!

Thoughtful conservatives believe in efficiency and abhor waste. Such desire for efficiency and abhorrence of waste is actually more grounded in the principles of conservatism than the vague do-gooderism of “Progressives” for “saving Mother Earth”, who more often than not choose feel-good solutions that actually are more often far worse for the environment than the rational behaviors of thoughtful conservatives.

Bottom line, I manage my life in such a way as to be as efficient as possible with my time and resource usage, though I never deprive myself in any way by such thoughtful behavior.

Recycling is one such effort. Where I live, recycling is single stream, so you toss garbage in one container and recyclables in the other. Garbage is picked up weekly and recyclables every other week. There are drop-centers for larger items. Throughout the county, contractors save money by hauling large quantities of recyclables to these centers which they would otherwise have to pay to landfill. The county has a county-wide processing center that processes all of these materials, and railroad cars of useful materials, including metals, glass, paper, and kraftboard are put back to good reuse every week.

Prices of such materials go up and down on a daily basis and some are worth more than others. In boom times, almost all basic recyclable materials can be sold for a profit, but in a depression, not so much. But recycling is not like copper mining where you just shut down the mines for a while when demand is low: recycling processing and collection infrastructure is in place through thick or thin times, including the many giant manufacturing facilities which have been optimized specifically to use these recycled materials.

In good times, recycling is self-sustaining, in slow times, a small subsidy is sometimes required, but the savings in terms of energy either way is enormous as it takes WAY less energy to re-use existing glass, steel, and aluminum than to make new, not to mention that high quality iron ore and high quality aluminum ore won’t last forever. So, recycling helps to make sure that our children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren will have some resources left for them to use as well.

And yes, at in some circumstances recycling requires a subsidy, but EVERYTHING that preserves the environment requires an economic subsidy. Clean air, clean water, clean oceans, clean everything all have hidden economic costs, because it’s far cheaper to dump toxins and poisons and crap in our air, water and land than to take the extra step of keeping our nest clean.

I can’t imagine very many people here would like to see our land, water, and air fouled like early industrial revolution England, our Eastern seaboard cities in the mid-1800’s-1900’s or China in the 1980’s, have PCBs dumped into the Hudson River, see Cleveland’s rivers catch on fire, etc., and yet to preserve our health from these kinds of toxic environments does have an economic cost. Anybody want to get rid of all of our sewage treatment plants and dump the shit stream of 350,000,000 people in the U.S into our rivers and oceans like mankind did for thousands of years until only about 65 years ago? After all, we’re all being billed BY THE GOVERNMENT every month to build and use those sewage treatment plants. Think of all of the money we could save.

On the other hand, conservatives understand the economic point of diminishing returns, for example, making our land, water, and air that extra 1% cleaner makes no sense if that extra cleanliness comes at a cost of the first 99%.

In the county I live in, the recycling program is run as an enterprise fund of the county and actually turns a profit that is used to fund a number of other related programs.

Much of their revenues come from contracts and services to large commercial organizations who find it much cheaper to pay to have recyclable materials hauled to the recycling center for processing rather than paying to have those materials hauled to a landfill because landfill tipping fees are so expensive around here.

The same is actually true for private individuals here: our overall solid waste fees are actually reduced because it’s cheaper for the haulers to rid themselves of the recyclable materials at the county processing center rather than paying the tipping fees to dispose of those materials at a landfill.

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