Reduce, Reuse vs Recycle: 1 of these is not like the other

Journal robi2106's Journal: Reduce, Reuse vs Recycle: 1 of these is not like the other 8

Journal by robi2106 on Wednesday November 15, 2006 @09:23PM

EDIT 2006-11-16 0930hrs MST: Presidential Announcement link from GMontag.

For what it is worth, the President proclaimed that today is "America Recycles Day." Full text here. Politics aside (and I am assuming the Democrats are mad that they didn't get the chance to say something like this instead of the hideous enemy "W") does this proclamation matter?

Is there sufficient economic incentive to recycle in the first place given the economic and negative environmental impact of recycling to begin with (not all recycling uses less energy / resources than consumed to create a new item or to recycle the item). I don't think that America is ready to recycle with any concerted and meaningful effort. This from a guy that picks through his trash to put vegetation in the compost bin, and all possible plastics, paper, glass, and metals in the sorted recycling bins for Monday delivery to who knows where (the other side of the dump as the garbage?). I am a habitual recycler. EVERYTHING possible gets recycled. I don't buy / use plastic disposables if at all possible including cups, plates, sporks, etc (except zip lock bags which I attempt to reuse a few times by washing them).

There might even be a better way to hit the same goal (of hugging trees and saving mother earth) by just following the first two R's of the 3Rs: reduce & reuse. Check out this piece by Jim Fedako of the Mises Institute, a noted Economist's foundation. Mises was the first economist to link Macro and Micro economics and show their relationship. Not an easy thought experiment if you ask me. Reducing consumption and reusing consumables is essentially FREE because you either don't spend money, or you use something more than once when you would have thrown it out. You CAN'T beat that for efficiency on a micro level. Recycling involves more industrial processes and as such inherently costs more resources to re-produce a product. Some recycling has the net effect of reusing a product, but it costs other products to reuse the first product. Is this even a net gain for the environment?

Americans know little about recycling other than what is fed to them by the mass media, and the mass media is scant on actual facts and heavy on hype because hype sells readers or attracts viewers. Save the earth! Recycle! But what does it take to recycle right now? How about this interesting bit from commonly available scientific studies and economics 101 courses everywhere:

Ironically, recycling does not eliminate environmental worries. Take newspapers, for example. First, recycled newspapers must be de-inked, often with chemicals, creating a sludge. Even if the sludge is harmless, it too must be disposed of, probably in a landfill. Second, recycling more newspapers will not necessarily preserve trees, because many trees are grown specifically to be made into paper. A study prepared for the environmental think tank Resources for the Future estimates that if paper recycling reaches 40 percent (compared with the present 30 percent), demand for virgin paper will fall by about 7 percent, and "some lands now being used to grow trees will be put to other uses," according to economist A. Clark Wiseman. The impact would not be large, but it is the opposite of what most people expect. Finally, curbside recycling programs usually require more trucks that use more energy and create more pollution. ...
Recycling is not a panacea for environmental problems. Instead, it is only one of several means for disposing of waste. It is widely used where the economics are favorable. Where they are not, government regulations may override the economics, but only by requiring actions, such as curbside recycling, that people will not do voluntarily. A fairer way to encourage recycling is to price the costs of disposal accurately.

In fact, how about you read the entire article (only 1 page).

Lets compare Japan's recycling to the USA. Japan recycles 50% of solid waste, according to this site compared to the US's 30% but consider that Japan has 1/2 as many people crammed into a land area that is 3.9% that of the US. Compare population densities and you get the picture. They simply have no room for landfills and _have_ to recycle to make efficient use of their land.

Now lets talk about the why of recycling. What makes or prompts a person to recycle. Guilt? Peer pressure? Common man.... every ones doing it! May be. Laziness and accessibility may play the biggest role in determining a person's willingness to recycle. Unless it causes a person physical pain to not recycle (an interesting thought exercises) or makes them give up their luxury priced, sugar filled, fatty lattes, then the average schmoe won't change their behavior.

What ultimately allows someone to recycle, let alone compels them to recycle, is available facilities. If no one will take the trash and recycle it, then you cannot recycle even if you want to. Oh sure you could fill up a pickup and drive across the state line to some other state, but that costs both time and gas, which creates even more pollution completely negating the desired positive effects.

Simple economics determine this part of the equation. Until the government gets involved (not always a bad thing despite me being a Libertarian). Lets look at Japan again.

April 1, 2001 a law went into effect in Japan that requires owners of appliances such as washing machines, televisions, air conditioners and refrigerators to pay about $60 to have their used goods taken away and recycled.

This is good an all, but in the US there is too much empty land where a consumer can toss out the old microwave and avoid paying that fee. I feel that pay first mechanisms offer a greater incentive to consumers to recycle. Add the $60 at the cash register (pain in the butt for commerce I must say, but not impossible to keep track of) and then have that money go back to the government held in trust until the old appliance is returned to a recycling center where the consumer gets their money back. Mean while the government gets to keep the interest on that floating time period as an administrative cost (it will just get wasted but that is the nature of things).

Granted, a pay-first scheme is decidedly un-Libertarian of me, especially if the government keeps the float, but consumers (and voters by extension) are pissy little bastards and can't be trusted any more than they can be trusted not to screw up their home computer with spy ware and viruses or their ballots with hanging chads (doesn't everyone run their hand along the ballot to make sure each hole is completely punched? I know I do... but I digress).

Are there limitations to the pay first / last incentives? Of course. Citizens will go to states that do not have economic recycling "incentives" (aka extra taxes) and then toss the used item in the nearest field, swamp, forest they can find creating far worse ecological problems than tossing it in a land fill. No law escapes the humans that govern it, created it, and abide by it, which is why I ultimately believe that no law will work more than about 80% of the time and by work I mean induce the desired effect in the population.

So lets bring this discussion back to recycling and away from government where all discussion ultimately become futile and cost $100 a screw driver...

Scrap aluminum went for $1,090 a ton in 1997, according to R.W. Beck Inc., which tracks the recyclables market, and it takes 95 percent less energy to turn aluminum cans into new ones.
Thus it is not surprising that 64 percent of aluminum cans are recycled.
But it takes only slightly less energy to recycle glass containers than make new ones, and because glass must be sorted by color and may be transported hundreds of miles to reprocess, recycling may use more energy than making new glass.
Also, the price of clear glass recyclables fell 20 percent in 1997 to $37 a ton.
Since the market for paper -- which is nearly 85 percent of all recycled materials -- collapsed in 1995, politicians are reportedly taking a more skeptical view of recycling programs. Many cities hoped to finance recycling programs from sales of recovered materials. But the price of newsprint, for instance, fell from more than $100 a ton in 1995 to $15 in 1997; thus collection programs require subsidies to operate. Source: "The Economics of Recycling," Congressional Quarterly Researcher, March 27, 1998.

If recycling uses more energy than creating a new item, then depending on the source of the energy, a GREATER ecological harm has been committed. Lets hit up the DOE.gov and look at the numbers. And while I am on the subject of the DOE, use the stats from their site. In my fair state, we run 80% Hydro power. Yep. About the cleanest power generating state there is. And we are a net producer. Go Check out your state [PDF]. So for recycling centers in Idaho it may actually be generically "greener" to recycle than in fossil fuel heavy states. I STRONGLY suggest a quick read through that document as it contains a wealth of information about your state, where it gets its energy and how much _crap_ is being spilled into the air to get it. Of course our fair state can only supply so much power via Hydro which is why natural gas fired plants have been built to help out with the California invasion (dam yuppies). Hydro can only go so far. Granted global warming will increase rain fall (more water in circulation and less tied up in useless ice) so hydro production may be able to keep up with some of the invasion. But in states where dirty production methods are used the environmental impact of recycling might be worse than just composting and letting nature digest the stuff.

This isn't to say that recycling will NOT eventually be economically as well as ecologically viable. Hopefully technology will improve to the extent that the cost to recycle provides significant incentives over not recycling. I hope to see companies competing for recycling indicating that there is profit to be made and the earth to be saved.

But what if recycling always produces more waste than is saved and takes more energy than is saved? Should we not recycle and focus on the first two Rs, Reduction of consumption and Reusing consumables? I'll plug the Mises Institute article again.

What's wrong with recycling? The answer is simple; it doesn't pay. And since it doesn't pay it is an inefficient use of the time, money, and scarce resources. That's right, as Mises would have argued: let prices be your guide. Prices are essential to evaluate actions ex post. If the accounting of a near past event reveals a financial loss, the activity was a waste of both the entrepreneur's and society's scarce resources..... If landfills were truly in short supply then the cost of dumping waste would quickly rise. I would then see the financial benefit to reducing my waste volume, and since the recycling bin does not count toward waste volume, the more in the recycling bin, the less in the increasingly expensive garbage cans. Prices drive entrepreneurial calculations and, hence, human action. Recycling is no different.

The will to recycle also depends on the "Why" of your recycling. Like hugging trees? Great. Feel good about recycling, while actually cost the municipality more in time, oversight (it is government after all) and energy to recycle than would have been needed otherwise. Taxes increase to cover the increased contract fees demanded by companies forced to provide recycling services. Back to the Mises article again. I think it turns a bit sarcastic, but from a pure economics point of view, there is little room for argument.

The concept of lost materials is fraught with errors. Glass headed to the landfills will sit quietly awaiting someone to desire its value. The glass is not going anywhere, and should glass become as dear as gold or even something less dear, you can bet that entrepreneurs would begin mining landfills for all those junked glass bottles, not to mention plastic, aluminum, etc. The only caveat to this train of thought is what Rothbard wrote about when he discussed psychic profit: the perceived benefit one gets from performing an action, even if that action leads to an economic loss.

Who reaps the real psychic reward from recycling? The statist do-gooder and the obsessed conservationist. Since recycling is now a statist goal, the do-gooders and greens force the cost of recycling on the unsuspecting masses by selling recycling as a pseudo-spiritual activity. In addition to these beneficiaries, there are those who have not considered the full costs of recycling, but their psychic benefit is more ephemeral than real. The other winners are the companies that do the collecting and process the materials, an industry that is sustained by mandates at the local level.

As a consumer, if we are at all logical then we might actually need to NOT recycle to save the earth so that one day when we need to we can recycle to save the earth.

jason

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