Posted on 10/19/2015 6:40:24 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
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.
The “Pig in the sink!”
Funny. Never thought about it in that light but you are right.
You are looking at this in a world that stops at the walls of the glass factory. Yes, if a truck of crushed glass shows up at their door, it is cheaper for them to use than raw materials, but how did it get there?
It starts as a jelly jar. When I empty it out, I could put the cap back on and throw it in the trash...but if I recycle it, lid off, its most definitely is getting washed. Again, it doesn’t matter how hot the furnace is, or how much stuff it burns off within the walls of the factory...the average consumer is unaffected by that and only cares about the bugs the jar attracts, and will waste the energy used to purify, lift (into tanks), and heat water, for each and every jar.
Then, my jelly jar travels in my car to a dumpster...usually carried in a disposable plastic bag, made from petroleum. On average, I drive a mile total out of my way to recycle around 20 lb of jars, a hundredth of a ton...at 20 mpg and $2.15, that’s $10.75 a ton just for me to get the jars to the dumpster, almost half the cost of delivered sand, but there is still a long journey ahead for my jelly jar.
Next, the county (which subsidizes this operation by forcing people to pay extra on their trash bill), hauls that dumpster around 20 miles to a sorting facility. The glass is not yet crushed, and is essentially 90% or more air, by volume, making for very inefficient trucking. The sorting facility, btw, is at the landfill - so if this glass had been in the trash, this would be the end of its travels and energy input. And there is added convenience, since they probably throw the green glass in the landfill anyway.
Once sorted, that same uncrushed, and very inefficient to haul, glass is taken to a crushing factory. I’m in Kansas...the closest factory is in Texas. If waste glass is a commodity, it stands to reason that this factory pays the same amount for local glass as they do for my glass that travels around 800 miles. Once again, the taxpayers in my county artificially pay the freight and cover the loss.
Then the crushing factory imparts energy to the jar, to pulverize it. I work in land development and have worked with economic development organizations - so I know that placing an environmental label on a facility gets good tax breaks. If I owned a cullet factory in Ft Worth, I’d shop for a better tax deal in Dallas and move there. In other words, it is more likely than not that the crushing factory is subsidized with local (and sometimes state) tax breaks that artificially prop up the industry.
And finally, the factory ships the crushed glass to the glass factory...probably a fairly short drive, but still requiring energy.
It is near impossibly to run the numbers on this...but I strongly suspect that the energy needed to do all this far exceeds the energy needed to suck some sand out of a hole and barge it to a glass factory...and if the market were unaltered by subsidies, this would be reflected in dollars as well. If there were a genuine market for this, I would get money for my jelly jars.
How would you find that out?
Bravo!
The way both teens looked at me, you'd think they found a stash of dead puppies in my fridge. Their mom just rolled her eyes at them and told them to shush, this was Mrs meowmeow's house and she can do what she wants!
At some point, I'm sure my friend and I will be hauled off to the re-education camps.
I don't believe it does, otherwise there would be companies willing to pay you for your scrap aluminum.
The only thing that "makes sense" is for the government to force millions of people to waste time (labor) sorting the aluminum, then take some of my money and give it to companies willing to haul it, then give the scrap away to companies willing to recycle it, after giving them tax breaks and incentives using yet more of my money.
In that sense... it make sense :-)
“... otherwise there would be companies willing to pay you for your scrap aluminum”
There are and they do.
It is many times more costly to produce aluminum from ore than to melt down existing aluminum. It is a deeply electricity-intensive process. Essentially, it takes a medium sized power plant to refine bauxite ore to aluminum.
It is the only clear example of where recycling does make sense.
Never recycled another piece of garbage again, happy about it too.
EnviroNazis stop at nothing, do they? And they LOVE to exploit and indoctrinate our kids.
We, too, had a LOT of discussions over the dinner table about what our boys were being ‘taught’ in school.
It was maddening.
See, it is easy to brainwash people into thinking they are “doing something”. I have wealthy, older neighbors that were excited to know the new trash company would recycle. They suck at math and never figured if their 2 pounds of plastic recycling would take more energy to recycle it than to simply toss it. They never educated themselves on the real costs and processes of dumps. Nope, they just got told throughout the 60’s and 70’s that recycling would save the planet and that the planet needed saving. Arrogance.
“Aluminum makes sense to recycle”
Only if it is in large quantities. A few pounds or ounces of aluminum are not energy efficient.
“I AM in favor of deposits on bottles and cans “
Why?? If it isn’t wroth it to anyone, why tax it?
He is 34 now, has a family and is not recycling, he still remembers what I did that day.
Just like the rest of the trash you see blowing around, if it isn't worth anything nobody is willing to pick it up.
Give the plastic water bottles value then somebody will........
It’s true that the “refinement” costs are significantly lower for recycling but the “exploration and production” costs for recycling are significantly higher.
So if you could build the plant right next to the aircraft graveyards in Arizona for example, yes then it would be beneficial, but even then you need to wonder, if recycling is so much cheaper, why are there still planes in graveyards?
If you look at the numbers it’s obvious why this is the case. 1kg of newly refined aluminum requires about 75c - $1 in electricity to refine and even with that the total market cost for 1kg is about $1.50.
Those costs are so low that they can be easily clobbered by an inefficient collection mechanism. Just as an example, if I have to drive 10 miles each way to the collection point and I do it every time I collect 1Kg of household aluminum I have blown $2.50 in just gas costs alone! Not to speak of the wasted time in driving, separating/washing and storing that junk.
Recycling anything including aluminum only makes sense if you fool a number of people to subsidize your logistical collections costs.
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