Is it worth it for me to recycle if my neighborhood is not serviced by a city-wide recycling program? Wouldn’t it waste more energy, resources, etc. to drive my recylcing to a center? I thought I had read once that the environmental return on investment of recycling could only be positive if it were a city-wide (mass) effort. If you happen to have a reliable source to back up your answer, that would be appreciated.
That’s a very difficult question to answer accurately, and it will vary for your location, your recycling headquarters’ location, type of recyclable, what the recyclers do with the material they collect, how often you go and with how much, what mileage your car or truck gets, etc. It is sometimes the case that even city-wide programs don’t return on the investment, based on similar factors. Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash is a good book exploring how one area’s system works in practice; it’s surprising how many things can and do go wrong.
Also of interest may be The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, though it’s sadly a decade out of date. It dispassionately discusses the issue of whether city programs have a positive impact, but in doing so it identifies the information you’d need to answer the question you’re asking. P. 38 starts a particularly relevant section titled “Does Recycling Pay?”
Remember that the slogan is Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
So reducing or reusing takes precedence over recycling.
Buying a couple of canvas grocery bags to use at the store every week will save about 100 throwaway bags (paper or plastic) over a year. And if you do get the store grocery bags, you can certainly reuse them before throwing them away. My mother uses plastic grocery bags rather than buying trash bags, for example.
And buying laundry detergent in a large box of the concentrate not only reduces the cardboard packaging used, it also reduces the fuel need to haul that to the grocery store.
Things like this to reduce & reuse might make more difference than what you can do in recycling. (Though I wouldn’t give up on that.)
P.S. Why doesn’t your city do recycling? Push your elected officials about this.
Sometimes, the taxpayers themselves don’t want it, because of the cost. This is the situation many communities, including the one I live in, face: taxpayers complain that curbside recycling would raise taxes, so they don’t want it. It never occurs to these taxpayers that what they save in taxes is otherwise spent in fuel and time to take stuff to the recycling centre.
Me, I’d rather raise taxes so I don’t have to store stuff and waste part of my free time taking stuff to the centre. But not everybody in my area feels this way. And so far, they’re the majority.
Per the sources I cited, depending on all the factors – particularly number of participants and efficiency of collection – city recycling may actually *not *be the best choice, environmentally speaking.
It’s an unfortunate reality of economics that not all materials rendered for recycling are actually recycled, or recycled efficiently.
If you don’t have city recycling and are dubious about the benefits of DIY, you can improve your personal environmental impact by going out of your way to buy products containing recycled materials. In my experience, the price difference in recycled vs. virgin pulp paper, for instance, is negligible in our household budget, and makes no difference at all in our experience of the paper, but buying the recycled stuff really does elevate the market for the stuff.
I.e., buy recycled for greatest impact.