This proves what I have thought about recycling for a long time.
A feel good program with no real return value or effect on the enviroment
We would be better off burning it to produce electricty and reducing the amount of coal we use
Editorial: Throwing away misguided notions about recycling
The Examiner
Apr 4, 2006 7:00 AM (11 hrs ago)
WASHINGTON - Nearly a third of all municipal solid waste is recycled, up from 8 percent in 1990, according to BioCycle magazine. Because of its enormous popularity, few public officials dare discuss recycling’s dirty little secrets: It costs more than it’s worth and really doesn’t help the environment all that much.
After years of forcing businesses and residents to sort out their garbage, some jurisdictions are quietly calling it quits. Lake County, Ohio, scrapped its widely praised and comprehensive curbside recycling program in the Cleveland suburbs last December after county officials glumly realized they’d have to double their $1 per month per household recycling subsidy just to break even. It eventually becomes a cost-benefit ratio thing, County Commissioner Dan Troy said. In some places, governments have had to pay to haul their sorted trash away. Recycling clearly isn’t paying its way.
The District of Columbia’s mandatory recycling program is no exception. According to the Department of Public Works/Office of Recycling’s just-released 2004 annual report, the city spent $4.3 million on recycling efforts, earning back just $829,347 in return. Same thing in New York, where it costs $130 to haul a ton of garbage to a landfill, but $240 to recycle the same stuff.
Curbside recycling is 35 percent to 55 percent more expensive than traditional garbage collection, which explains why national recycling rates have remained flat since 1998. As The Examiner reported in February, the District government itself recycled only 14 percent of its waste — far short of the 45 percent goal — two years after Mayor Anthony Williams settled a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club intended to force D.C. to enforce its own recycling laws. The public wasn’t told that more recycling would be an even bigger drag on the city’s budget. Clemson University economics professor Daniel Benjamin, who has studied recycling for more than 15 years, put it bluntly: Mandatory recycling wastes resources ... and misleads the public.
There is tremendous advantage in recycling hazardous materials, such as used motor oil or caustic chemicals. But two throwaways that usually land in the plastic bin — glass and paper — are environmentally benign, cheap and made from renewable resources. Modern state-of-the-art landfills now contain, contaminants so well that the Environmental Protection Agency estimates they will cause only one cancer-related death in the U.S. every 50 years, and landfill capacity is at an all-time high. Recycling itself pollutes the environment, which is why 13 of America’s 50 worst Superfund sites were recycling facilities.
More than 4,000 local jurisdictions employ volume-based pricing for solid waste disposal, called the pay-as-you-throw approach. People who generate the most trash pay the most to haul it to a landfill. The only problem, as economists studying a PAYT program in Charlottesville discovered, is that illegal dumping almost doubled as a result. But recycling subsidies could easily be diverted to increase PAYT enforcement efforts.
In “The Economics of Waste,” University of Michigan economist Richard Porter writes, “Residential recycling does not now pay off in a social benefit-cost sense for the average municipality.” Makes you wonder why we’re still doing it.
