For example: A friend is telling me that it is wasteful to recycle glass because there is lots of inexpensive sand in the world to make new bottles with. He says that the energy and labor needed to pick up, then sort and clean, then melt down and reuse, old bottles is much greater than what is expended to simply make new bottles. I can sort of see this - for example, what do they do at the recycler to get the labels off the bottles? Lead capsules off the wine bottles? Etc…? The same is true for paper, according to my friend. Is he wrong?
It depends. If energy is priced appropriately (ie if the price of a type of energy is equal to the cost of producing the last unit of that type of energy including all environmental costs) and other costs are too (landfill, congestion etc etc), then a government programme which subdisies recycling will be inefficient. Under those circumstances individuals who recycled in the absence of a government programme would either struggle to find somewhere to deposit their empties or be transferring resources to someone else for no reason. It wouldn’t be efficiency enhancing, but it wouldn’t be terribly wasteful either.
But energy, landfill and congestion are not properly priced - although we don’t know by how much.* So some recycling programme is likely to be efficiency enhancing. Actual ones probably vary. Some may correct market failures. Some may just make middle clas people feel good. Most are probably a mixture of both. But what is clear is that you can’t judge the wastefulness of such programmes by market prices alone: you have to factor in social costs - those things that are un- or inadequately priced by the market.
*[sub] and there are other complications here that I won’t bore you with[/sub]
Not necessarily. Even if energy is priced appropiately, a recycle program will only be inefficient if it takes more total energy to recycle than to make new ones.
Your friend is full of horse manure. Glass isn’t made from sand scooped up from the yard; it’s made from sand that is selected to produce desirable qualities. It must be low in iron and other colored impurities, high in silica (as opposed to feldspar and other constituents of common sand), and consistent in size (most glass manufacturers use automated equipment, which won’t melt sand evenly if it’s not sized properly).
Lead capsules, paper labels, and the like are easily removed by comparison.
Let’s not forget the impact on landfills. Every bottle that gets recycled doesn’t need to be stuffed in a fake mountain in someone’s backyard, which said real estate becomes pretty much forever useless. (Anyone who believes that you can make ski mountains out of landfills is seriously deluded, and has never lived within a mile of one.) That’s a major reason right there. I shudder to think how much extra garbage we’re going to be sending to Jersey and Staten Island now that NYC has quit recycling glass and plastic.
Well, I’ve played golf on a couple of different landfill courses. Looked great, no bad smells. I played badly, but that was normal. Also the Shoreline Ampitheater in the San Francisco Bay Area is built on a former landfill. I’ve seen a number of show there, again with no ill effects. So, maybe not ski mountains, but the land is certainly not off limits forever.
As far as the OP goes a big consideration is where in the country the recycling program is taking place.
On the western side of the US things are so spread out that the transportation costs get large rather fast. IIRC, the glass-paper-plastic recycling program in Albuquerque NM, started out losing a bunch of money due to the tranoportaion costs. It was a long time ago so I could very well be wrong but I don’t think I am. They may have changed the program to make things more cost effective.
The Australian Government’s economic research and analysis agency - the Productivity Commission - did an in depth study of this issue a few years back:
The basic conclusions were some types of recycling are good, some are bad. Whether it works properly or not depends largely on the type of product, the costs associated with recycling it (including collection costs), whether or not the raw resource is priced properly, and whether or not the cost of landfill is priced properly.
For example, high value (relatively) low volume products like aluminium which have very low reprocessing costs (recycling aluminium uses only 10% of the energy of virgin aluminium and produces only 10% of the water pollution) are generally viable as recyclables. However, for low value, high volume products that cost a lot to recycle, the most environmentally beneficial way of dealing with them is landfill - high gloss magazine paper is a good example.
I believe you may be conflating older and newer landfulls. Older landfills (otherwise knows as “piles of freaking garbage with dirt on them”) are indeed often unsuitable.
Newer landfills, which have gas collection (and often usage) systems, leachate diversion and collection systems, clay bottoms, frequent HDPE layers and whatnot, are actually fairly easy to reclaim, often within just a few years following closure.
I agree with the impact on landfills, but I must tell you that I live near two of them myself. One looks like any other big giant hill (which now has a HUGE flag painted on the side) and the other (for those of you in Milwaukee, it’s Crystal Ridge) is where I have been skiing several times.
Alright, but then there is the social cost of recycling. Millions of people have been chastised, or been forced out of guilt to carry around garbage until they could find the ‘appropriate’ receptical. Instead of putting one can on the curb, we must put out two or three, once every week, for the rest of our lives. I’m personally against recycling, philosophically, yet every time I throw an aluminum can into the garbage I feel a twinge of guilt because of the hours of recycling propaganda I’ve been exposed to. And I can’t recall a single recycling advertisement that was even slightly entertaining. At least some beer commercials are tasteful and genuinely funny. If I see another smug suburbanite dutifully rolling out the recycling can, I believe I will start shouting and pointing at the sky.
Bullcrap. It is not OK not to recycle; you should feel guilty for sending recyclable material to a landfill, just as one should feel guilty for littering (another example of carrying around garbage until one finds the appropriate receptacle).
You feel inconvenienced? Tough. Most civic duties are inconvenient. Are you philosophically opposed to voting and jury duty too?
You resent feeling guilty? Tough. Ever consider that maybe it’s not the “propaganda”? That maybe you’re wrong and you know it?
Recycling household waste is in most places, simply not efficient, and not beneficial in any measureable way to the environment. The base materials for household recyclables have never been in short supply, don’t have high initial production costs, and don’t resist chemical degradation in use or recycling. There is no shortage of landfill space, just a shortage of landfill permits: there are still large areas of the desert southwest that are fairly unpopulated (the desert southwest is another country near California).
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As for littering, um, , -it is better than using a trash can, , -for aluminum cans anyway. The poor people come and pick them up and take them all to the recycler…
I defer to the TM re: post-fill usage. In my experience landfills (older landfills in the Northeast) have remained stinky and uninhabitable for decades after they were closed. Near my hometown, people were conned into buying homes at the base of the local landfill by being told that it would one day likely become a ski mountain. The thing is still smelly from miles away, still has nothing green growing on it, and is quite an eyesore.
I’m glad things are getting better. I hope Staten Island ends up non-stinky one day, too. I hate driving down 440 past that enormous, smelly seagull feeding ground.
