The modern recycling movement can be traced to two events that happened in the late 1980’s. The first, in 1987, involved a barge named Mobro 4000 that attempted to dock in Morehead City, North Carolina and dump its 3,100 tons of waste that originated in Islip, New York. The garbage was ultimately carried back to Brooklyn, burned and the ashes buried in Islip. The other event, in 1989, was the publication of a paper by Jay Winston Porter, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator. The paper was titled “The Solid Waste Dilemma: an Agenda for Action.” In the paper Mr. Porter stated that recycling was “absolutely vital”. Local governments took notice and since the late 1980’s, the growth of mandatory recycling programs has reached nearly 10,000 communities in the United States today. Sadly, recycling in America is a colossal waste of money.
Recycling proponents point to the assertion that we are running out of landfill space and many times point to Mr. Porter’s paper for support. The problem with this argument is that the EPA report focused on the number of landfills that had closed to that point and did not take into account that the remaining landfills expanded to handle more waste . The reality is it would take a vast amount of waste to create a problem worth being concerned about for the nation as a whole. According to A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square area of land measuring 35 miles on each side. This is a total of 1225 square miles: only one tenth of one percent of the land area in the United States that is still available for grazing.
Allies of the recycling movement point out that materials like plastics and polystyrene do not biodegrade in landfills while natural materials like paper and wood do. On the surface this may seem to be true, but landfills create airless anaerobic environments and these materials in fact don’t biodegrade at all without air. William Rathje, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona who specializes in landfills, has discovered that these natural materials, specifically paper bags, can use more landfill space than plastic packaging. Plastic packaging has been evolving into a more efficient mechanism because manufacturers have been developing more sturdy and thinner materials. Twelve plastic grocery bags occupy the same amount of space as one paper bag and juice cartons take up only half the space of the glass bottles that would be used as a “natural” alternative.
We need to save the trees! That’s the rallying cry of environmentalists everywhere and they couldn’t be more wrong. The way this argument is presented is that recycling saves virgin forest pulp. That part is indeed true, but there’s no need to save virgin forest pulp. The truth is that the vast majority of virgin pulp that goes into making paper comes from trees grown specifically for the purpose of making paper. We are not running out of wood; in fact, we have three times more forest today than we did in 1920. Trees are a renewable resource and when we use them we grow more trees to replace them. Making the argument that we need to recycle to save the trees makes about as much sense as saying that we’re running out of popcorn because we eat it. If correctly managed, tree farms grown for paper fulfillment needs can guarantee an almost infinite supply of trees.
What of reuse? It’s often pointed out that reusing your ceramic coffee cup instead of using a polystyrene one every single time is a much better use of resources. Looking at the two side by side one may be tempted to draw that conclusion, but in order to make a fair comparison the entire life cycle needs to be taken into account. Dr Martin Hocking, in his report Reusable and Disposable Cups: an Energy-Based Evaluation, concluded you'd need to use your ceramic mug 1,006 times for it to break even (in energy terms) with its polystyrene competitor. This is largely because kilns are extraordinarily energy intensive, because using a dishwasher to wash the cup also uses energy, and because cups get broken. Yes, it’s true that if you break your ceramic mug after 950 uses you would have been better off using 950 polystyrene cups. Inherently because cups are re-used and disposables are not means that in restaurants you run a higher risk of coming in contact with germs and bacteria from previous users of that cup, albeit probably small.
Another assertion by recycling proponents is that, on the whole, it’s cost effective. There are a couple of facts that point to recycling being a colossal waste of public funds. The first is that the true cost of recycling is hidden by subsidies, which by their inclusion in the process prove that recycling is not an economically feasible undertaking. Subsidies, by definition, are payments that the government makes using public tax dollars to support obsolete or questionable business models. Subsidies to the recycling industry cost Americans eight billion dollars a year. This alone firmly debunks the myth that there is a net refund back to the local government for recycling. The city of New York has reported a net loss every year for the last fifteen years, and Mayor Bloomberg has recently proposed cutting back on recycling as a way to save money.
Most damning criticism of the recycling movement is the estimation of one expert that it costs local governments $50-$60 to dispose of a ton of waste and $150 a ton to collect it. Clearly it costs nearly three times more to collect waste for recycling than it does to merely dump it . Who is this expert? It’s none other than Jay Winston Porter, author of the EPA report and a man who has clearly abandoned his own ship.