Dumping on Recycling
November 14, 2008
The practice of recycling is incredibly popular. It’s usually one of the first practices adopted by people trying to go green. But its popularity has also led to a backlash: it’s currently pretty fashionable to dump on recycling. Critics seem to make three main claims: (1) that the problem they were intended to solve (overflowing, dangerous landfills) never really existed, (2) that the the benefits of recycling are scant and the costs too high, and (3) that recycling actually harms the environment!
The critics are right about point number one: We’re not “running out” of landfill space, and we never were.
There are fewer, but much cleaner and safer, landfills now than there used to be (although in Atlanta they tend to be concentrated in the poor neighborhoods surrounding our church), and modern “sanitary” landfills are not nearly the health threat that other environmental dangers are. Even pretty high rates of recycling don’t diminish the waste stream into landfills that much, and they don’t remove the most dangerous materials (like pesticides, cleaning solutions, batteries, etc.). Household hazardous waste disposal isn’t solved by most recycling programs, and requires its own solutions (see Julie Clawson’s experience here).
Does recycling pay? It’s hard to get good numbers, because the cost of collecting recycling goes down as the scale increases–as more families participate, the cost per ton of collected recyclables takes a nose dive. Many critics have ignored the revenue from selling recyclables, which sometimes more than offsets the collection cost, and they fail to take into account the avoided costs of not having to landfill the recyclable rubbish. If you simply compare the financial costs of collecting recycling and other garbage, recycling doesn’t look like a good deal. It’s a better deal if you factor in the revenue from selling scrap, but still it’s often a net cost to municipalities. So why do it?
We should recycle because of the other environmental benefits. Society is able to produce consumer goods from recycled materials much more efficiently and with less pollution than when using raw materials like wood, petroleum, and metal ores. Making new aluminum cans from old ones takes only about a quarter the energy that producing them from raw aluminum ore does. Using recyclables in manufacturing reduces energy use, water, and air pollution dramatically. That doesn’t get factored into the financial benefits from recycling very easily, because the costs from air and water pollution are borne by people who aren’t compensated for their losses. People are healthier because we recycle, and we are able to reduce the pressure we put on the planet, and those benefits almost always tip the balance in favor of recycling.
Do you think your carefully separated recyclables sometimes get dumped into the regular trash? They probably do sometimes–but you can find out by asking, and then complaining if someone is taking shortcuts. The benefits of doing it right are clear. But…
There are other big issues, and the energy we spend organizing our lives and our governments around recycling could be put to other uses–like cleaning up industrial landfills, which are far more hazardous than municipal landfills. We continue to build cities that require us to use cars as the main way to get around. We continue to buy more and more stuff, and console ourselves by recycling some of it, instead of figuring out how to prosper by using less to start with. Air pollution is reduced by recycling, but can be reduced even more by making our homes and businesses more energy efficient.
People like to recycle. It’s a great first step that seems to make sense to a lot of people, regardless of the critics. It’s an environmental action everyone can take, and it feels good. Churches that recycle show the world that they care about God’s creation. We can mostly ignore the critics, especially the ones who don’t offer any suggestions about how we should care for the environment. But if recycling becomes an obsession, or distracts us from the other virtues of simplicity, Sabbath-keeping, nature and beauty appreciation, and love for God and neighbor, then we need to realign our priorities.
A good resource for consumers on effective environmental choices is called (surprise!)The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, by Michael Brower and Warren Leon. You can get it online here, but why not ask your local independent bookseller for it instead.
Rusty Pritchard is a natural resource economist and the editor of Creation Care magazine, and his wife makes him recycle religiously.
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[...] the wake of World Recycling Day, a follow up link to Rusty’s post: a nifty video refresher on what exactly recycling is and how it works at [...]