Kick Curbside Recycling to the Curb!
by Brian Farmer
When the first Earth Day observance was staged on April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans gathered at various venues across the country, in order to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment. One of the ideas promoted as an agenda action item was that of recycling, particularly as it related to things made from metal, glass, paper, and plastic. This idea was considered to be a no-brainer, to be accepted virtually without question. After all, had not generations of Americans been raised on the admonition, “Waste not, want not!”? And so municipalities from coast to coast started setting up recycling programs in order to encourage people to become responsible stewards of the environment. With the passage of time, as often happens when the heavy hand of government gets involved, what started out as voluntary eventually became compulsory, to the point where curbside recycling is now almost as prevalent as curbside garbage collection. Disposing of Junkie Ideas After more than four decades, we have now had enough experience with recycling to see that it is not the panacea that it was cracked up to be. In some cases, the downside is so obvious that even an elementary-school student can grasp it. Brooke Williamsen, a sixth grader in Appleton, Wisconsin, made the following observation in a report that she wrote as a class project:
That excerpt from Brooke’s report blows out of the water the argument that curbside recycling saves resources. In fact, instituting a curbside recycling program is essentially moving from once-a-week trash collection to twice-a-week trash collection. Or, if curbside recycling pickups are carried out every other week, it is basically a case of moving from four rubbish pickups per month to six rubbish pickups per month. To make the argument that increasing the number of curbside pickups saves resources would strain the credulity of any rational person. Only hidden government subsidies and creative accounting make it superficially appear that curbside recycling saves resources. As also pointed out in Brooke’s commentary, if it truly made economic sense to institute a curbside recycling program, then it should not cost the consumer anything. Furthermore, if the payback outweighed the costs involved, then the local government should not have to mandate any kind of recycling program at all because the private sector would rush in to take advantage of a profitable opportunity. In fact, recycling is economically feasible in many situations, such as recycling various metals. That is why one can observe the classic scene of a homeless person pushing around a shopping cart while scavenging for aluminum cans to toss into it. Due to its somewhat unique chemistry, it takes enormous amounts of electricity to separate the aluminum metal from the ore, even though aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust. Recycling aluminum requires only five percent as much energy as obtaining the metal from the ore. Indeed, slightly more than half of the aluminum used in the United States is the product of recycling. And in countries such as Brazil and Japan, the recycling rate is more than 80 percent. But while privately owned scrap yards can exist as a viable business by purchasing scrap metal and then selling it to smelters, scrap yards generally do not engage in curbside pickup, for the very reasons cited in the excerpt above from Brooke’s article. Despite that lack of curbside collection activity, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries reports that its members recycle a greater amount of metal, glass, paper, and plastic than the recycling programs of all levels of government (local, county, and state) combined. Finding Room for Trash
Although the environmentalists lose the argument on the economics of curbside recycling, their support for such recycling programs relies on a host of other arguments that initially appear to be at least somewhat convincing. However, on closer inspection, they turn out to be little more than fallacies. One of those arguments is that, without mandated curbside recycling programs, we would not be able to handle all of the trash that we produce. Up until World War II, there were hundreds of giant incinerators around the United States that simply burned the bulk of rubbish produced by consumers. The advantage derived from burning trash was the reduction in disposal volume by anywhere from 85 to 95 percent. The disadvantage was that it produced offensive odors, noxious gases, and irritating particulate matter in the smoke. After World War II, concerns about air pollution led to a gradual replacement of incinerators by so-called “sanitary landfills,” in which all forms of trash were dumped in a suitable place and then buried. During the 1980s, reports started surfacing that the country might be running out of places to dump its garbage, as the number of operating landfills began to fall significantly. Sloppy analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the media, and commentators, such as then-Senator Al Gore and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, focused on the number of landfills, rather than the capacity of the landfills that were in operation. Due to new EPA regulations, as well as mergers and consolidations within the waste disposal industry, there had been a move to use new, much larger landfills, while smaller and less economical landfills were being shut down. So, while the clueless Chicken Littles were running around in a panic trying to warn us of an impending crisis, overall landfill capacity was actually increasing. Various studies have attempted to estimate how much space will be needed to handle America’s trash in the foreseeable future. According to Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, if New York City’s Fresh Kills landfill operation on Staten Island were used as a yardstick, where trash was piled up to a height of 255 feet, all of the trash produced in the United States over the next 100 years could fit on a square patch of land measuring approximately 10 miles on each side. Hence, the contention that we need curbside recycling in order to prevent future generations from being buried under a mountain of garbage is clearly absurd. July 26, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The New American
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