** Do most recycling programs lose money? ** * Of course. So does plain old garbage collection. *
This is from Cecil’s column about recyling, and the comment got me curious. We pay $90 a quarter for garbage/yard waste disposal, which seems to me, a nice sum for the job. Since BFI collects all over Gwinnett County, at $90 bucks a pop, why would they be losing money, and if so, what would be the incentive to stay in business??
Thanks,
It’s losing your money. 
Who’d you think lost money, the county? The company that does the collection?
Whether it’s through taxes or fees, you still end up paying.
At least when they try to resell what you’re throwing out, that cost can be somewhat reduced.
Well, in theory anyway. My brother works at a recycling plant, and the main reason they lose money is that despite only collecting from recycling containers, the amount of sorting they have to do is massive.
Seems people are too damn stupid to separate their metals from their plastics from their papers from their organic waste before doing their bit for the environment…
Try taking “it loses money” as shorthand for “the efficient level of garbage disposal would not be privately profitable”.
picmr
In my part of Houston, we just went to the automated waste containers (no manpower, just a driver with a rig that dumps the container). Once a week pickup.
We were told to put our yard waste next to the container (3 feet away). Another truck would be along to pick it up.
So, now we have 2 trucks once a week plus the cost of the special container. We used to have one truck twice a week bags only. Figure!
Scratch a palm, anyone?
Regarding the garbage/recycling column http://www.straightdope.com/columns/000804.html,
It’s been almost 8 years, but I recall my material science professor saying that refining bauxite to aluminum required tremendous amounts of electricity, and by recycling one saved about 85% of the total electricity required.
I’d like to hear more about it if anyone knows for certain, but if true, that’s a significant cost savings.
You might be interested in this tidbit I picked up from The Aluminum Association. They say (here) that:
That’s damn significant; even better than you remember.
While I basically agree with Cecil’s assessment of recycling his opening line (“Yeah recycling is stupid …”) kinda cheesed me off. I guess my attitude toward recycling borders on the religious, but the huge effort that we’ve put into recycling so far has shown that can and often does save money (versus the cost of disposal).
Recyling is an important public policy because solid waste disposal is expensive and will become more so. The success of recycling depends on everyone’s participation. The message needs to be clear: recycling has been shown to be a worthwhile effort. (And please sort and rinse your recyclables!) The most important point that Cecil didn’t make is that the higher the participation (the diversion rate in recycling lingo) the better the economics.
As the previous two posts have mentioned. The economics of aluminum can recyling are excellent. (The energy saved also has a greenhouse gas double word score.) The economics of glass bottle recycling, even considering energy savings and the alternative cost of landfilling, are very poor.
Regarding the availability of landfill space, yes the landfill crisis was greatly exagerated. But entending the life of your local landfill does have very real economic benefits. If you think your disposal fees won’t increase dramatically after your trash needs to be trucked 50 miles away, you are mistaken.
Another way of looking at economic viability of recycling is that there are a lot more municipal recyling programs in the black than e-retailers.
gordon wrote:
Surely no Houstonian would say “Figure!” But I’ll take your word for it. You could be a relocated northeasterner.
Up here in the cosmopolitan Plano, Texas, we went to the system you describe more than ten years ago. It’s the best thing the city has ever done. Here are the reasons:
I don’t have to buy plastic garbage bags anymore. I keep trash in paper grocery sacks, and when they’re full, just throw them in the big container.
Taking out the trash on trash day is now quick and easy - just roll the container out to the alley.
Raccoons, coyotes, and neighborhood pets can’t get into the containers like they could with the old system, with plastic bags sitting around on the ground. Well, raccoons can, but it’s not even nearly the problem that it used to be.
Worker’s comp insurance used to be a big expense for the city, and it was rising, from all the back injuries of the garbage collectors picking up 50-pound bags all day. They still have collectors picking up the recycling bins, but they’re fairly small and usually weigh much less. The amount of stuff that has to be lifted by a human has gone way down, because the truck picks up the big containers.
I don’t think it’s a bribery thing as you suggest - it’s a money-saver for the city and a great convenience for the citizens. Besides, garbage collection is not run by the mafia down here like it is in the northeast (surely you’re a displaced Yankee). Most places, the city does the whole thing.
Sorry, Al, but it’s been specifically stated that “witnessing” should be in GD…
This is more of a statement of religious principles than anything else.
Only inasmuch as landfill space is limited and NIMBYism prevents the opening of more landfills. Honestly, dumping garbage on a hill for a few years and then bulldozing it under is cheap. It’s getting neighbors that won’t complain that’s the trick.
Because if some people don’t do it and still aren’t smacked by the hand of YHVH the whole house of cards falls down?
Whether or not it’s true, the message has to be clear.
Well, of course, that’s what “economies of scale” means.
And is probably one reason why aluminum containers had deposits in many states, even before the great recycling push. When something is profitable all on its own, people tend to do it.
So…where’s the other shoe? The obvious follow-up to that is that it doesn’t really make sense to recycle cheap, non-toxic items.
**
What you’re ignoring is that people have a choice: lower fees for close-by landfills (with the other attendant problems) or higher fees for landfills further away. That’s a valid economic trade-off, and (as Cecil stated in his column) some communities are actually eager to get landfills.
**
So that the total of their income from selling recycled wastes at set (inflated) prices to government programs and from their government subsidies are less than their operating costs? Color me un-impressed. The subsidies and pricing levels have been deliberately set to make operators a profit, so they’d have to be idiots to lose money.
Let’s be honest here. It makes economic sense to recycle certain items and not others. And claiming that recycling will save the earth is just propaganda. What recycling most has been able to do is to help municipal governments put off the hard work of finding sites for new landfills and getting them approved.
We’ve had voluntary recycling for a long time, for products where it made sense. When I was a kid, I made pocket money walking ditches and collecting bottles for the deposit. We’ve been recycling soda bottles and cans for decades.
The problem with recycling came in when it was disconnected from the free market by government regulation. Our city introduced a ‘blue box’ program at the height of the green movement in the mid 80’s. But we didn’t have the infrastructure for it, and there was no market for all the things they were collecting. So what was the great environmental benefit?
[ul]
[li]Several million large plastic blue boxes manufactured[/li][li]Two garbage trucks making the rounds instead of one, a special one being used to collect the recyled goods[/li][li]The manufacture of huge storage facilities to contain all the recycled materials that built up because the city couldn’t unload them[/li][/ul]
After several years of this, our storage facilities filled up, and we eventually had to pay a company to come in and haul most of it off to a landfill anyway. The waste of time and money AND extra damage to the environment was tremendous.
The city changed their ‘blue box’ scheme last year, and now we are all supposed to use ‘blue bags’. All those blue boxes are useless now.
At the time, several free-market think tanks were proposing alternative market-driven solutions to the apparent waste problem, and by and large they were completely ignored.
According to free-market proponents, the big problem with municipal garbage collection is that the costs are disconnected from use. Everyone pays the same, no matter what their trash habits. So, the wasteful are subsidized by the frugal. As everyone knows, if you subsidize something you get more of it, and if you tax something you get less of it.
The solution proposed was to bill people based on the actual amount of garbage they generate, either by volume or weight. Everyone is given coded tags for their garbage, and when they fill up a bag they tag it. When the bag is thrown in the truck, it’s scanned and the person who generated the garbage is billed a bit more.
This has wonderful side effects. There would be a ripple down all the way to manufacturers, who would find a competitive advantage in providing re-usable or low-waste containers for their foods. All those diaper services who lost their market to disposables might have found a whole new market again.
Almost no one on the ‘green’ side agreed with it. They claimed it was discriminatory, regressive, etc. I think a few communities adopted variations on the ‘tag a bag’ proposal, but very few.
Maybe I didn’t phrase my question very clearly. Cecil stated in his column BOTH things lose money, recycling AND regular garbage pickup. I asked why REGULAR garbage pickups lose money. It doesn’t seem possible that refuse companies (we have four in the Atlanta area) lose money, or they wouldn’t stay in business. The question is: ** How do they stay in business if they are losing money, ** might be more on point.
Maybe I didn’t phrase my answer very clearly ;): they stay in business because they are at least partly financed (ie subsidised) by taxes.
picmr
** picmr, ** I guess I just didn’t get what you meant earlier. However I didn’t know taxes support the companies either. It does make me wonder why they are set apart from other utilities for that benefit. Unless it turns out, the government supports the water, gas and electric companies too.
Anti Pro wrote:
Maybe Cecil was referring to the regular city-operated garbage collection. I wasn’t aware that some cities outsource garbage collection to an independent company. If he was just talking about city-run garbage pickup, it loses money because it costs the city money but has no (direct) revenue.
BTW, now that I’ve seen the user name Sam Stone in this thread, I can’t stop singing
Sam Stone
came home
to his wife and family
after serving in
the conflict overseas
Recycling isn’t a house of cards. Good programs save money. This message needs to be stated clearly because the public has a hard time digesting complicated economic arguments. Unlike many public polices, recyling depends on voluntary cooperation. (Bottle deposits have some advantages but face political obstacles.)
The confusion about who’s making or losing money is because we’re not distinguishing between the county or municpality and the folks doing the collection. Sometimes they’re one and the same. In a good recycling program, the savings in avoided disposal fees plus the income for selling material exceeds the government’s collection costs or fee to a contractor. While it may seem that the contractor has a guaranteed profit, some, notably the contractor for Pittburgh’s program, have failed spectacularly.
Clearing up some misinformation in recent posts: EPA and most environmental groups strongly support tag a bag (aka pay-as-you-throw) programs. These programs may seem like one of those good ideas that exist only in economics textbooks, but over a hundred of these program exist today. The point of these programs is to provide consumers with economic incentives to divert waste into the recycling stream (as well as to change purchasing and usage habits to make less waste.)
Regarding the relative viability among the types of recyclables, I agree based purely on economics it would probably make sense for many communities to stop recyling glass. I they do because consumers expect it and because the economics are so so. But Ace’s earlier comment about it not making sense to recycle cheap, nontoxic items does not follow. Cardboard, at about $0.01 per lb is cheap but still viable. All consumer recycling is of nontoxics (unless you consider motor oil toxic.) Household hazardous waste pickups are all disposed of.
And regarding the difficulty of siting new landfills, which is it Ace, something podunk communities welcome or a tough decision that governments put off? You can’t have it both ways. Landfills are a lot more complicated than a whole in the ground. They need to be planned years in advance.
Cecil’s right; the ultimate success or failure of recycling comes down to econmomics. But recycling arouses emotions because it speaks to some folks’ core values. I believe its just wrong to waste mountains of stuff when the waste could be avoided at no cost (and even at a savings) simply by planning and cooperation. Some people may view this value as the mother of anal retentiveness. I consider thrift to be a virtue. You see a aluminum can in the trash. I see a wasted semi-precious metal with amazing engineering properties.
Well, garbage collection involves a different sort of market failure than gas and electricity.
Left to itself the garbage market would face some problems: in large number settings (ie cities), people would take into account only their own benefits from having their own garbage removed. If you like, we all benefit from living in a non-stinky disease ridden area, but the sum of our voluntary contributions would pay for less than the desireable amount of sanitation. The market fails due to public good/ externality problems. (Of course some people would say that the market would overcome these problems given the chance.)
Government involvement in electricity and gas usually relates to the natural monopoly problem: the most obviously efficient number of pipelines/ networks is one, but if there is only one producer consumers tend to get ripped off.
So the “justification” for government intervention is different: one is to internalise effects not taken account of by the market, the other to prevent the misuse of market power.
picmr
Hmmm. I don’t think I like that we have plenty of land fill sites left statement. That’s like saying we have plenty of viable land left to poison for future generations.
Or, we have plenty of forests left for the loggers to strip cut.
I live in Florida. Once we stated that we had plenty of land available, especially swamp land, and now, years later, the State is crowded to the point that the fresh water system is heavily stressed, thousands of acres of swamp land have been filled and built on and the general land and water pollution levels have soared. So, we do not have plenty of land left for land fills.
Japan, I believe, has a highly successful, 90% recycling rate. If they can do it, why can’t we? They even have these nifty little compact mulch makers in their homes – clean, scent free and efficient. Organic waste goes in and valuable garden fertilizer comes out. We might have resources for a million years, but why use them all up now? Remember New York City’s garbage barge that had a big problem finding any place to dump?
I used to go around Florida and find pristine lands, but now I go around and find beer cans, those damn plastic 6 pack rings, plastic soda bottles, styrofoam hamburger containers and bags of garbage everywhere. We have sink holes popping up as new people suck down the fresh water and bacteria problems as septic tanks fill the ground with effluvia and that drifts into rivers and streams. My local landfill is Site Number Three - with the first two having been sealed off and designated uninhabitable for 20 or 30 years and having to be monitored for gas, ground water pollution and signs of heavy metal contamination.
The last has become a joke – starting out as a flat spot near a corrections facility (further punishment for the convicts – garbage stink when the wind changes) but soon rising to a massive hill or pyramid that is the highest spot in town, that reeks, needs special linings, special vents and special care.
No one is sure where to put the next garbage monster because land around the county has suddenly become pretty valuable.
We have a limited recycling program in effect in that we have bins that we drag out once a week for the men in the white trucks. They roar up, hastily go through the contents, flinging unacceptable items on our lawns, bang the rest into the bins, throw the containers down and roar irritatedly off. (Quite a few folks have given up on recycling because of this.)
So, how do the Japanese do it so well and why can’t we?
One answer to your question FarTreker is simply size: Japan is small and fairly densely populated, the US isn’t. You have lots of spare land.
As to your comment, of course you are right. But Cecil presumably didn’t mean that poorly-sited, inadequately managed land-fills are no problem.
picmr
Show your biases much?
We do have plenty of potential landfill sites left. Hundreds of thousands of acres, enough for all the garbage we could possibly create for thousands of years. The problem is siting those landfills: near enough to the large groupings of people to keep trucking costs low and far enough away to keep land costs low. Just because Florida is a boom state (and relatively small) doesn’t mean there’s no space anywhere.
**
You clear cut and you strip mine. If you’re going to jerk your knee, at least get the terminology straight.
**
Florida is the poster child for bad development strategies in the USA; it’s been awash in corruption, bribery and just plain shady dealing for most of this century. So it’s not the greatest example.
And your point is really begging the question: you basically say “We thought we had a lot of land, so we built on all of it. Where did it go?” Well, you built on it.
**
That’s called “litter.” Different subject entirely. (Though, of course, throwing trash on the roadside does reduce the amount going into landfills…)
**
So it was designed badly and failed?
**
I’m sure. From all you wrote (including the stuff I snipped), it sounds like you’ve had the kind of local governments whose only ruling principle is “Do it cheap and fast.” That tends to come back and bite you on the ass. I’m not blaming you – as I said, Florida is famous for bad government. Sounds like they’re still on that kick, with your descriptions of the recycling pickup truck.
I’m not saying that recycling can’t work, I’m just saying that it’s only one possible solution and not necessarily the best solution for all types of waste in all places. Apparently that’s a heresy these days.
Oh, and I didn’t mean the stuff at the beginning of my reply as a personal attack, but knee-jerk “recycling is good! We will brook no criticism of it!” really sticks in my craw.
Commencing countdown to Great Debates.
10
.
.
.
9
.
.
.
8
.
.
.