There’s a cute series of advertisements populating basic cable these days, offered by the Ad Council, that encourage us to recycle our plastic containers of various sorts. The ads anthropomorphize plastic bottles, if you can believe it, to make obvious and ham-fisted emotional plays. We are, I presume, to believe that a plastic bottle not only has a sense of purpose, but some sort of trans-substantial soul that reincarnates into the comb made via recycling.
It’s very warm and touchy-feely, but “warm and touchy-feely” is a red flag that tells eyes-open cynics “we can’t make an argument on the merits, so we’re going to snow you with emotion.” In the case of recycling, whether it’s just plastic or across-the-board, that’s pretty much the only type of argument that can be made.
I won’t bother regurgitating the mountain of analysis (it’s readily available to anyone with internet access i.e. anyone who’s reading this) that shows that the economics of recycling (barring a couple exceptions, notably aluminum cans) stinks. It costs more to collect and process waste via recycling (even after selling the recycled materials to re-users) than it does to take it to a landfill. And, despite high-publicity histrionics, we’ve got plenty of landfill space. As reported by that environment-hating rag the New York Times, all the waste America will generate in the next 1000 years would fill a single landfill 35 miles on a side and 100 yards deep. That sounds like a big chunk of land, but that’s 0.03% of America’s area. For a thousand years worth of our refuse.
Still, one might argue, we’re being reckless in a tragedy-of-the-commons sort of way. Here’s where the always-overlooked part of the equation comes in, because people prefer looking at only the half of the story that supports their preferences. The added net cost of recycling is an opportunity cost. It’s money that’s taken away either from the private economy where it would create wealth or from better public sector uses. Want the city to better help the poor? Tell politicians to stop wasting money on recycling.
Mandatory recycling is, like so much else that government does, a dog-and-pony show. It’s a visible example of “doing good,” scare quotes and all, and has the added bonus of being a form of physical penance for the affirmatively conscious. You get to feel good about recycling, because you’re sorting your trash into multiple containers and taking those multiple containers to the curb on multiple days of the week, and if you’re that sort of person, you can judge yourself in comparison to your neighbors by comparing your recycle bins. How, though, does it actually help the environment? The extra cost of recycling vs landfill isn’t just an abstract. It’s manpower, energy and capital equipment that’s needed for collection, it’s manpower, energy and capital equipment that’s needed for sorting and processing, and it’s manpower, energy and capital equipment for remanufacturing. If the energy balance between recycled and “virgin” materials is wrong, you’re actually hurting the environment rather than helping it. Lest anyone get too excited about leaving raw materials in the ground out of some fealty to Mother Earth – what difference is there between leaving petroleum in the ground and putting a petroleum product like a plastic bottle in the ground?
A couple decades back, I spent a month hiking through the Canyonlands of southeastern Utah as part of an Outward Bound course. Towards the end of the month, we ended up in the actual Canyonlands National Park. Our instructors had been teaching us minimum-impact outdoors techniques throughout the course, but the “rules” changed significantly once inside the park. We were informed that a “national park” designation tends to increase human traffic at least ten-fold, so the “leave no trace” goal was not a viable strategy. Instead, the goal was to concentrate the “damage” by sticking to established trails and camping at designated sites. And, indeed, we worked our way through the canyons by following well-beaten paths instead of forging our own way. Waste management should be looked at the same way – as a “concentrate and minimize the damage.” And in a macro sense – not just in a simplistic “lets make landfills smaller” way.
Waste is a fact of modern life. It’s not a tragedy, it’s an efficiency. It’s something that improves our standards of living. Getting shampoo in a disposable plastic bottle is more convenient than having to visit a supermarket with a glass or metal jug for refilling, and convenience translates to freedom to do things that bring us more happiness and/or greater wealth. Each of us can find happiness in doing things that are better for the environment – after all, this is our only rock and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to keep it a good place to live – but we should not do things that aren’t beneficial merely because they superficially seem to be. We should manage the waste that modern life produces in a manner that’s economically efficient. Doing so not only enables us to live better lives, but gives us more ability to help those that could use our help. After all, isn’t that what recycling itself is about – “helping” for the greater good?
Recycling that is economically viable will, if government permits it, happen naturally. If there’s money to be made, someone will figure out a way to make it. The biggest danger is, of course, that government meddling prevents that from happening, or skews things in a cronyist fashion. Recycling that is not economically viable should be looked at skeptically. Sorting our trash into multiple bins may seem “better,” but that’s because most of us don’t think about the extra work that sorting creates down the line. It’s analogous to handing off the responsibility for charity to the government. It may sound like a great idea, but once you’re no longer involved, stuff doesn’t work out the way you want it to.
Finally, there are other things we can do if we want to, as individuals, reduce the community impact of the waste we generate. Refill your water bottles, especially if you live in a municipality with good tap water (like NY City). If it suits you (and with the caveat that there are potential pitfalls), bring your own bags to the grocery store. If you have the space and the use, compost your non-animal organic waste. I have three compost bins, Each year, one becomes the year’s repository, one continues to “cook,” and one gets used in the garden and vegetable beds. All my non-meat kitchen waste goes in, as well as paper bags and plates, autumn leaves, grass clippings when I’m not mulching, and a good bit of other yard waste. That’s less stuff that has to be collected by trucks and managed at disposal centers. Obviously, this doesn’t work for an apartment dweller in midtown Manhattan, but each of us can figure out ways to do good things. There’s nothing wrong and everything right with that.
Recycle when it’s worth doing. Do stuff that works and that makes sense. We should recycle when recycling is the better approach. When it’s not, when the costs and opportunity costs of recycling are greater than the benefits, we should not pretend the opposite.
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