Recycling: Your Time Can Be Better Spent!

Many people believe recycling either pays for itself or is worth the cost. Both positions are wrong. Every community recycling program in America today costs more than the revenue it generates. The value of recycled materials on the open market has declined dramatically in recent years, and in many cases there is no market at all.

Aluminum--once the most valuable recycled resource, worth 60 cents a pound--is now worth about 20 cents a pound. Modern aluminum cans are thinner (you may have noticed) and have one-half the aluminum they had 30 years ago. Today, one must collect six cans to get the same economic return delivered by one can three decades ago.

While the payout for recyclables has fallen, the cost of recycling has risen. The labor needed to collect, sort, and clean recyclables is more expensive than it used to be, as is the fuel, trucks, and facilities used in the process. The market for most products manufactured from recycled materials is largely supported by government subsidies or government programs requiring recycled content in certain products.

Still Worth Doing?

Some people believe recycling is nevertheless worth doing because, they believe,

• Recycling conserves valuable material resources, many of which are in short supply.

• Recycling means we use less landfill space, which is also in short supply ... and unsafe.

• Recycling is “good for the environment.”

Recycling is, in fact, good only for the human psyche. We get a warm and fuzzy feeling when we recycle, even though we are wrong to feel that way.

We are not running out of, nor will we ever run out of, any of the resources we recycle. We are not cutting down “endangered forests” today to make paper. We plant far more trees than we harvest each year. Wood is in ample supply

Similarly, glass is made from silica dioxide--common beach sand--the most abundant mineral in the crust of the Earth. Plastic is derived from petroleum byproducts after fuel is harvested from the raw material. While this supply has some limits, we can now create plastic from plant material grown on farms.

Nor are we running out of landfill space. All the garbage we will generate in the next 10 centuries will require less than 35 square miles to a height of only 300 feet. While people rarely want landfills in their backyards, they can be excellent neighbors, contributing wonderful parklands to our communities. Landfills are no longer a threat to the environment or public health. State-of-the-art landfills, with redundant clay and plastic liners and leachate collection systems, have now replaced all of our previously unsafe dumps.

The biggest fallacy is the “it’s good for the environment” argument that we save energy and water resources by recycling. In fact, manufacturing paper, glass, and plastic from recycled materials uses appreciably more energy and water and produces as much or more air pollution as manufacturing from raw materials.

An Honest, Economical Approach

Nevertheless, the recycling ethic does have an important place in society. Eliminating waste in honest and economic ways will always benefit society.

The best answer is a “pay as you throw” program, where solid waste collection is paid for not by taxpayers generally, but by individuals or households based on the volume of garbage they discard. In some communities today, families must buy special trash bags that hold their waste for disposal. The more trash bags they use, the more they pay. To lower their costs, they can alter their buying and disposal habits. They can buy products with less packaging. They can compost organic wastes. They can reuse many of their waste materials.

Finally, and I believe most importantly, the human effort donated by the public to support recycling can be donated instead to other, more beneficial programs. I am a bleeding heart liberal when it comes to improving the human condition. I do not believe recycling does this.

Recycling requires a great deal of contributed labor by every person in a community. That time--perhaps an hour per week, roughly half a day per month--could be more productively contributed to efforts to reduce homelessness, crime, alcoholism, and drug addiction, and to improve education and cope with teenage pregnancy.

Your town needs your help: at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen, counseling alcoholics or drug addicts, serving as a crime watch block parent, volunteer aide in schools, or teenage counselor. Your most valuable asset is your time. Give it where it will have the greatest impact. Recycling is not one of those places.

Dr. Jay Lehr is science director for The Heartland Institute.