Max Borders |
January 13, 2008
This article first appeared in the Greensboro News & Record, January
13, 2008.
Cue music. Julia stared blankly from her jail cell. She thought about the
bottle that landed her there… not what was in the bottle, the bottle itself.
Julia didn’t get a DUI. She failed to recycle. Now she’s paying in hard time.
Thanks to a new statewide law, these are the kinds of stories we may be hearing
soon. Any ABC license-holder (e.g. a restaurant or bar owner) who fails to
implement a glass and aluminum recycling program will be charged with a
class-one misdemeanor alongside those accused of assaulting a handicapped person
or burning a cross on someone’s property.
So how did we get to this point? If we’re prepared to jail people for failing
to recycle, shouldn’t we at least ask “to what end?” Why has recycling
become so serious and, most importantly, why are our elected officials so
determined to force compliance with such drastic penalties?
“Applying resource economics to recycling is like applying nutrition research
to the Holy Communion,” said environmental policy analyst John Baden.
That’s a colorful way of suggesting that people don’t recycle because beer
bottles are valuable. If bottles weren’t trash, people would pay us to
collect them. There would be strip-mining operations at landfills. Recycling
bottles and cans doesn’t make a significant impact on conserving landfill space,
either. If it did, we’d already do it without fines – as landfill scarcity would
make recycling the more cost-effective option (i.e. the price of waste disposal
would become too costly).
Duke Political Science Professor Michael Munger also thinks recycling has
become something of a religious rite: “[C]laims for recycling rest on an
assumed, if not always articulated, moral imperative rather than on trade-offs
or costs. But underlying this claim … is some murky idea that recycling ‘uses
up’ fewer resources than making things from scratch.” But it doesn’t. Prices
tell us so.
So why do it?
Maybe recycling is more environmentally friendly than landfills—both in terms
of pollution and resource conservation. Which pollution? Which resources?
Recycling programs are a manufacturing process like anything else, except
municipalities have fewer incentives to conserve resources associated with the
process than a for-profit company. But that’s not the worst of it. Many cities
require twice the number of diesel-and-carbon-spewing trucks to collect
recyclable materials separately. Twice the oil and gas. So, it’s not so much
that you’re conserving energy or resources. You’re simply displacing the kind of
resources being consumed and the type of pollution being emitted.
"The net cost for recycling is more than double the cost for regular garbage
collection that will go to the transfer station” said Greensboro Councilman Tom
Phillips in a public hearing. “A lot of what we recycle winds up at the
landfill anyway because of contamination or lack of markets for the recycled
material." He’s right. And if bureaucrats have the gall to fine or
imprison someone for throwing out a bottle, they’d better at least figure out
how not to break the law themselves.
But won’t recycling prevent us from eventually being buried in garbage?
According to environmental economist Dan Benjamin, “Ted Turner’s flying D ranch
outside Bozeman, Montana, could handle all of America’s trash for the next
century—with 50,000 acres left over for his bison.” Of course, trash deposited
closer to its point-of-origin will lower transportation costs and make landfill
spots even more diffuse, nationwide. But the point is: we shouldn’t worry about
space.
Don’t landfills poison people? Ironically, not even the EPA sees fit to
regulate municipal solid waste disposal. Indeed, according to 30-year EPA
veteran David Schnare: “EPA regulates the toxic stuff through its hazardous
waste disposal regulations. Municipal waste isn’t hazardous, and the only
regulations that apply are [landfill] siting, construction and air emissions
regulations for methane. The EPA doesn’t regulate risks from these sites because
the risks, if any, are undeserving of regulation.” Given the advent of
high-density polyethylene and geotextile technologies, modern landfills are able
to contain leachate (the only landfill pollutant) very effectively. In short,
you have a greater chance of being hit by a recycling truck than being harmed by
a landfill.
Here’s a paradox: the more paper we consume, the more trees there are. That’s
because paper companies have an incentive to plant more trees when we buy and
discard their products. And yet most towns seem hell-bent on recycling
newspapers and cardboard. So what about non-renewables like aluminum?
Again, look at price: even if we rescue a few aluminum cans with all of our
effort, the latest check on aluminum prices suggests we’re nowhere near a peak.
So might we be using scarcer resources to conserve more abundant ones? The
economics of recycling says we are. That makes recycling a wasteful article of
religious faith. Isn’t there something in the Constitution about government
getting mixed up in religion? Yet that’s what they’re doing it in North Carolina
with draconian punishments associated with ABC laws. Only the new religion is
green.
REPLY:
It's no small wonder that no one has ever heard of the Pope Foundation! Does this pass as research there? How about the (subsidized) costs of landfills, (heavily subsidized) transportation costs, (subsidized) forest land and products and even (subsidized) energy costs for the extraction of raw materials... just for starters! You clearly confuse even yourself when you say the 'EPA doesn't regulate hazardous household materials because it already regulates harzardous material [sic]'. Are you arguing that the federal government should regulate, even manage all municipal landfills? Hmm... that's interesting.
The public DEMANDS local government recycling programs to coordinate a social dilemma. Costs to the public are far far higher for landfilling solid waste! Invoking Ted Turner is also ironic, because you in effect make the case that one of the world's wealthiest individual has amassed enough of the nation's cheapest land to store all of the waste. Nevermind the costs of large plots of land for future landfill capacity near urban areas with a fraction of Mr. Turner's resources. The recent use of eminent domain to secure new landfill space in North Carolina seems to bother everyone but Max Borders. How about your next autistic rant of an editorial explore how many trees the Pope foundation could plant with your salary?