Disposing of Recycling

In 1987, a garbage barge by the name of Mobro 4000, spent two months moving through the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico looking for a landfill to dump its load. The captain of the barge was originally planning on dumping in a cheap landfill in Louisiana. But with the hopes of cutting transportation costs, he attempted to sway Jones County, North Carolina to accept the trash. The Mobro pulled into the dock before the deal could be finalized, causing landfill officials to assume that the Mobro’s load posed a threat. Thus, the Mobro was turned away, and the media lunged at the story like a cheetah on its prey.

This over-exaggerated story prompted people to believe that we are actually running out of landfill space in the United States. The EPA jumped on the opportunity to put itself in the spotlight. They released a document titled “The Solid Waste Dilemma: An Agenda for Action”. In this widely read document, they stated that “We are rapidly depleting our landfill areas” and “recycling is absolutely vital”. Jay Winston Porter, an administrator in the EPA, made a public statement declaring that the citizens of the United States needed to increase total recycling by 25%; otherwise, we would run out of landfill space. But rather than calculating remaining landfill capacity, the EPA calculated the number of remaining landfills (not taking into account the recent growth in landfill sizes). Hence the modern recycling movement was born.

Why do we recycle? Recycling feels good because we’re “helping” the world. But how exactly does this process, in which many of us take part, help the world? We are told that we are saving money when we recycle because we’re not spending as much on raw materials. We’re ensuring that our very limited resources don’t run out any time soon by reusing materials. We’re prolonging the time until the impending doom that is an eventual lack of landfill space in the United States comes to pass. Landfills are harmful to the environment, so by decreasing landfill space, we’re saving our air and water supply. All of these reasons are false. Unfortunately, most of our rationale for feeling good about recycling is not justified. Let us break down all of these aspects to determine whether or not recycling is actually helping the world.

Does recycling save money? No: for the most part, recycling is more costly for firms as well as consumers. On the surface, recycling may not seem nearly as expensive as it actually is. The reason for this misrepresentation is the federal government and its endless subsidies. The government takes our tax dollars and allocates it to recycling agencies in the name of public interest. The government does this because they don’t trust us to do what they believe is right without their forceful hand doing it for us. The government’s money isn’t really the government’s money. It’s our money, and our representatives are allowing subsidies to be given to recycling agencies for the simple reason that the majority of people believe that recycling is good. There have even been studies that show that more people in the United States recycle than vote. According to Daniel Benjamin, a professor of economics at Clemson University who’s done an extensive amount of research debunking myths about recycling, most of what makes people feel good about recycling is based on misinformation. “They’ve been told since the second or third grade that recycling is wonderful for the environment, that it saves resources, and that it’s going to save human kind from itself. And so, based on this misinformation, they think that they’re doing the right thing.”

Where do all those tax dollars go? According to the EPA there is an average of 50 dollars spent per ton of garbage being disposed, while it costs an average of 160 dollars per ton to recycle materials. It costs us roughly three times more to recycle than to dispose of materials. One of the original benefits of recycling as posed by the EPA was that after the government subsidized recycling, and the firms reproduced goods out of the recycled material, a net profit would be returned to the government which could be used to fund other projects. According to Angela Logomasini, the Director of Risk and Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, this concept has been proven wrong throughout the last fifteen years. “For fifteen years New York has had a net loss every year, this year alone New York has had a net loss of 33 million dollars.”

One of the primary reasons many environmentalists cite for recycling is the myth that we are running out of both renewable and nonrenewable resources. Whether the source is trees, bauxite (ore used to make aluminum), or oil, the answer offered by environmentalists is to recycle. The truth is that rather than losing resources, we are actually gaining resources.

The long standing argument for recycling paper products is quite simple. The more paper we recycle, the fewer trees that are chopped down. This seems to make sense, but what is often overlooked is the kinds of trees that are used. The truth is that most paper is made from trees that are grown for the sole reason of being used to make paper. In fact, there are three times more trees now than there were in 1920. Most of the virgin pulp that goes into paper is grown on tree farms. Those tree farms would not exist if people did not buy, and throw away paper. Logically, it follows that the more we recycle, the fewer trees there are in the world. Not only does recycling paper not save trees, it creates more toxins in the atmosphere. It’s a manufacturing process which creates gases that pollute the atmosphere. After all of the de-inking, burning, and bleaching, there is actually more harm done to the environment than good.

But as trees are renewable resources, what about nonrenewable sources? The absolute best way to measure the scarcity of nonrenewable sources such as oil is to use the market prices. We can’t fully grasp a global amount of materials without looking at the world market. Simple supply and demand teaches us that if the price of a resource is going up, the resource is becoming scarcer. And if the price is going down, the resource is becoming more plentiful.

Does recycling save energy and resources? No, it increases energy use in transport, sorting, storing, and cleaning, all of the things needed to get the material back to a useful state. All of these factors actually add to wasteful consumption of resources rather than decreasing it. While it may seem like a paradox, the numbers show that even as our consumption of natural resources increases, the availability of these resources also increases. Much of this is due to human innovation and our ability to adapt to circumstances. As a species, we have been able to continually discover new means of supply. The beauty of the balance is the inverse relationship between quantity of resources and their respective prices. The higher the price of a scarce resource, the more innovation entrepreneurs and engineers strive to achieve. There is no sign that we will run out of any of the resources which we now recycle in the foreseeable future. The majority of industrial products have seen a price decrease of roughly 80% in the last 150 years.

After the exploited Mobro fiasco, panic about landfills began to spread throughout the population. Many people still believe that landfills are dangerous and that we will soon have landfills in every front and backyard of America. This could not be further from the truth. Studies have shown that if we so desired, we could make a land fill measuring 35 miles on each side and it would have enough capacity to hold the United States trash for the next one thousand years. That’s not to say we are going to create one massive landfill, but it certainly puts our amount of landfill space in perspective.

In terms of danger, modern landfills pose little to no threat to the environment. Modern landfills are founded with a thick layer of clay that runs for yards into the ground. Inside the clay layer there is a filtering system which filters out leachate, which is a toxic fluid created in all landfills. On top of the trash is a thin rubberlike layer that keeps all gases from leaving the landfill. The primary gas created by the decomposing materials within landfills is methane. Methane is an energy gas, and we’ve come so far as to use it as such! Modern landfills have a way of venting out the methane and harvesting it as an energy source. This Methane gas is effective enough to provide energy to multiple homes for several years.

The EPA quietly admits that the chance of a modern landfill actually having any sort of a dangerous effect on nature or humans is one in a billion. We take much greater chances of risk through out our daily life with transportation and food. The notion that landfills are dangerous is simply not true. It’s fear-mongering at its best.

From logistical analysis and just pure common sense, we can determine that recycling actually does more harm to the world than good. How are we helping the world? We are not. We are feeling good for no reason, which may seem productive on a personal level for some people. But a word of advice, if you would like to have a feeling of accomplishment without really accomplishing anything positive, go ahead and sit on a bar stool drinking the day away. You are effectively completing the same task, without wasting 8 billion dollars.