You're not still recycling, are you?
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| Mon, 12-29-2003 - 5:15pm |
by Dennis T. Avery
My neighbors are unhappy to learn that the trash they’ve carefully sorted for years into brown bottles, green bottles, cans, and paper is being dumped back into one pile at the local landfill. Except for aluminum cans, no one wants the sorted trash items. Is this bad for the environment?
Probably not. I checked with Dr. Daniel Benjamin of Clemson University (and the PERC Center for Free Market Environmentalism) and he says: First, don’t worry that the trash going into our landfills will take over too much of the land area. People today are actually throwing away less trash (in both volume and tonnage) than in previous, less-affluent generations. Dr. Benjamin says the average U.S. household today generates one-third less trash than the average family in Mexico!
How can this be?
In significant part, it’s because we throw away less food, thanks to commercial processing and packaging.
When chickens, for example, are commercially processed, the beaks, claws, and innards are turned into pet food instead of going into the kitchen garbage can. Commercial processing and packaging of 1,000 chickens adds about 17 pounds of paper and plastic wrap—but turns (recycles) about 2,000 pounds of chicken by-products into useful purposes. Ditto for such things as the peelings from frozen French fries and the rinds from making orange juice. (The “factory†potato and citrus peels go to feed livestock.)
Millions of additional tons of organic waste go down the garbage disposals and so on to waste treatment plants, instead of drawing flies at the landfill.
Companies have also turned to lighter-weight packages (mainly to cut transport costs) and the total weight of the packages entering landfills, says Dr. Benjamin, has fallen by 40 percent. Plastic two-liter soft drink bottles weigh 30 percent less than the old glass bottles. Plastic bags weight 70 percent less than paper. Even aluminum beverage cans now weigh 40 percent less.
Thirty years ago we were told that we were running out of landfill space. New York City wasn’t able to dump its garbage at sea any more, and it got piled up on Staten Island. What happened?
A new rule on ocean dumping and a temporary shortage of landfills with permits basically caused a bottleneck. New York initially started exporting its trash by rail. (Some if it came to Virginia, where we had lots of rural gullies to fill, and were very cheerful about the dumping fees.)
Today, the United States has 25 percent more landfill space permitted than we had 25 years ago. And all the trash we’re expected to dump in the next 100 years would fit into a landfill about 10 miles square.
There are no plans for one centralized national dump, of course, because it’s more advantageous for most communities to save the transportation costs, and turn their completed landfills into parks and tennis courts within their own borders.
What about pollution leaking from the landfills? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), never likely to minimize a pollution risk, says leakage from modern America’s landfills can be expected to cause one cancer-related death over the next 50 years. In other words, the danger is too low to be measured. Today’s landfills are sited away from groundwater sources; built on a foundation of several feet of dense clay; the foundation is covered with thick plastic liners, and the liners are then covered with several feet of sand or gravel. Any leachate is drained out via collection pipes and sent to the municipal wastewater treatment plants.
Won’t we be losing irreplaceable resources if we landfill instead of recycling? Too often, recycling proponents focused on the aluminum or newspaper being recycled, and forgot about the fuel, manpower and other resources it took to turn the trash into something useful. And with new technology, resources such as copper and wood have declined in value.
Franklin Associates, which consults for EPA, says extensive recycling is 35 percent more expensive than conventional disposal, and curbside recycling is 55 percent more expensive. In other words, recycling takes more resources than landfilling.
Why did people promote recycling so heavily in the first place? Lots of people probably misunderstood the costs and benefits. It’s also true that eco-activists urgently wanted everybody to feel a direct stake in saving the planet. Telling us all to recycle was their way to make us feel eco-involved.
Today, however, when environmental concern is near-universal and conservation techniques are far better, we don’t need “phony†recycling campaigns.
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, VA, and is director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues.

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Link?
Actually you're recycling cost is very low. I know many places have discontinued their programs because they cost 4-5 times what regular waste disposal does, and besides too much of that stuff winds up in another landfill somewhere down the road. The market for recycled plastic, glass, & paper is as near non-existant as it ever was. Of course some things are worthwhile to recycle like aluminum but there's always been a natural market for those items.
I don't separate my garbage, and I don't waste perfectly good water (which is in short supply here) washing it and then having to worry about drying it so that it doesn't breed all kinds of nasty stuff for us & the trash collectors to breathe. We have an ecologically sound land-fill with plenty room to grow.
Here is the URL for the particular story you asked about http://www.americanoutlook.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=3161&pubtype=DailyArticles
As you can see below, there are many others, as well, but unfortunately, I haven't been able to put my finger on my favorite article. It came out about 6-8 months ago in the British press & was all about how Swedish environmentalists have come to the conclusion, that cutting down trees is better for the environment than recycling paper afterall.
Recycling Programs Cost Central Florida Residents
http://www.wftv.com/news/2647007/detail.html
t 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.
http://www.ncpa.org/pi/enviro/april98b.html
If you value the environment, don't recycle
http://www.env.leeds.ac.uk/envi2063/971122/features.html
RECYCLING RUBBISH: EIGHT GREAT MYTHS ABOUT WASTE DISPOSAL
Recycling is a long-practiced, productive, indeed essential, element of the market system. Informed, voluntary recycling conserves resources and raises our wealth. In sharp contrast, misleading educational programs encourage the waste of resources when they overstate the benefits of recycling. And mandatory recycling programs, in which people are compelled to do what they know is not sensible, routinely make society worse off. Market prices are sufficient to induce the trashman to come, and to make his burden bearable, and neither he nor we can hope for any better than that.
Economic Reality Limits Plastics Recycling
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/env/2002/pd040102d.html
Recycling means 25% fewer trees
http://www.globalideasbank.org/diyfut/DIY-134.HTML
Why Can recycling Should Be Abolished
"Spiegel-Online"
Two studies in February by the Danish Environmental Office "Miljøstyrelsen" yielded that composting and the recycling of plastic products is just as ineffective as can recycling. An intense debate has also broken out in neighboring Sweden, after, in February, the former boss of the conservation authority there and four other high-caliber environmental protection experts published a mutual dossier in the biggest Swedish daily "Dagens Nyheter", speaking out heavily in favor of simply burning not only cans, but non-returnable packaging, glass, plastic and food scraps as well. "It's better for the environment not to sort the garbage ", it says in the dossier.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/923344/posts
*Recycling entails so much energy, water and labor to collect, sort, clean and process the materials that many public officials now realize most mandated recycling hurts, rather than helps, the environment.
*About 40 percent of the New York's glass, metal and plastic waste is not suitable for recycling -- so it ends up in landfills anyway.
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/env/2002/pd031902a.html
Throw away the green and blue bags and forget those trips to the bottle bank: recycling household waste is a load of, well, rubbish, according to leading environmentalists and waste campaigners," reports the Tele. "In a reversal of decades-old wisdom, they argue that burning cardboard, plastics and food leftovers is better for the environment and the economy than recycling."
http://www.techcentralstation.be/040403N.html
Swedes trash myth of refuse recycling
In a reversal of decades-old wisdom, they argue that burning cardboard, plastics and food leftovers is better for the environment and the economy than recycling.
http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/03/02/wrecyc02.xml&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=215725
Recycling Trendy, But Often Costly
http://www.ncpa.org/pd/pdenv38.html
Recycling 'risks binmen's lungs'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2891609.stm
Wasting Resources to Reduce Waste: Recycling in New Jersey
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-202.html
Renee
Here,
Renee
Miffy
Glad to hear that your area is pleased with its program.
Been pleased with it for
That's great!
I was told that most German homes are not equipped with garbage disposals.
Miffy
Personally, I recycle when I remember (sadly where I work, recycling is not really happening).
I'm still not sure about the benefits of recycling. What bothers me most about it, is that people think they can use as much of a resource as they want, because it's all going to be recycled anyway. But how many people really buy recycled goods?
But really, I'd rather just reuse something than recycle or throw it away.
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