I suspect there was a reason that last week’s article “Rethinking Recycling” was placed in the commentary section of this paper. Before I go further, I should say that the author of “Rethinking Recycling” was right in at least two things: we should recycle aluminum and other metals and we should try to reduce or reuse something before ever moving to recycling. It is not a coincidence that the three Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) follow that exact order. This being said, the author was flat-out wrong and/or short-sighted on almost all other accounts.
I have some things in common with the author of “Rethinking Recycling.” For one, I would call myself an environmentalist. I would even say I am a select recycler. There is one fundamental difference in my use of the term: I choose to recycle all things that have reached the end of their presently useful life and that are eligible for recycling. According to “Rethinking Recycling,” this means I am ill informed. I disagree.
It is unfortunate that “Rethinking Recycling” uses an economist’s views to justify the creation of landfills, saying that a landfill “44 miles long, 44 miles wide and 120 feet deep” would store our trash for the next thousand years. I think that this was supposed to seem small. However, a piece of land 44 miles square equates to an area of 1,936 square miles. According to the New York City Department of City Planning, New York City itself is only 321 square miles. Given that, we could fit six New York Cities in all that landfill space. Even if it takes a thousand years to make and is not actually one giant landfill but rather thousands of smaller ones, that’s a lot of literally “wasted” space.
Further, landfills themselves cause logistical problems. According to the Recycling Association of Minnesota’s “The Common Questions of the Curmudgeon,” “garbage disposal becomes more expensive as you put landfills further away from where it is collected. That makes disposal less attractive. Few communities would like to have a landfill nearby, making it difficult to build new landfills at a sufficient pace.” The essential problem (aside from concerns about toxins, etc.) that we see with landfills is where to put them. It’s a case of NIMBY: not in my backyard.
Something else I find a bit disturbing about last week’s article is the cavalier idea that because “America has more trees now than it did one hundred years ago,” we don’t have to worry about paper consumption. This sounds great until you look at the state we were in one hundred years ago. Unlike today, we didn’t have the massive shipping infrastructure that enables us to cut down trees on other continents in such a cost-effective manner. This typically meant that we cut down the forests we had at hand. Some of those forests are finally coming back. This brings me to another problem with “Rethinking Recycling”: the idea that we shouldn’t recycle paper and many other materials.
The ten best things to recycle—according to the National Recycling Coalition are—in order: aluminum, PET plastic bottles, newspaper, corrugated cardboard, steel cans, HDPE plastic bottles, glass containers, magazines, mixed paper and computers.
While “Rethinking Recycling” points out that recycling paper isn’t amazing for the environment, the author seems to ignore findings by a 1995 study by The Public Recycling Officials of Pennsylvania, reproduced on Carnegie Mellon’s “Green Practices” online brochure which states that “making new paper from old paper uses 30 percent to 55 percent less energy than making paper from trees and reduces related air pollution by 95 percent.” Additionally, for every ton of paper recycled we save 17 trees, 275 pounds of sulfur, 350 lbs of limestone, 9,000 lbs of steam, 60,000 gal of water, 225 kilowatt hours of electricity and 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space.
As for plastic, the same study notes that “recycled plastics are made into fiberfill, bottles, shower stalls, recycling bins, scouring pads, paintbrushes, industrial strapping, drainpipes, plastic lumber, and flowerpots.” In terms of glass, the same study says that “every ton of glass recycled saves the equivalent of nine gallons of fuel oil needed to make glass from virgin materials,” and that “container glass can be recycled repeatedly with no loss of quantity or quality.” It’s absolutely ridiculous to say that we ought to make these products out of virgin material when we could use recycled material to do the same thing.
Also, in an attempt to dispel a nasty Gustavus rumor, our recyclables are not simply thrown away. The Recycling Association of Minnesota notes that “it’s illegal for anyone to collect your recyclables and then dispose of [them].” The items placed in the recycling bin are separated and bales of separated materials are “[shipped] to end markets, like paper mills, aluminum smelters, steel mills, and so on.”
This means that everything that can feasibly be recycled, is.
I haven’t addressed the economic side of recycling for a reason: recycling can be more expensive in many cases than using virgin materials. The author of “Rethinking Recycling” takes this to mean that “Recycling will become a reality only when it becomes cost effective.” Unfortunately, it will only become cost effective when it is done on a wide scale, and the products are used in a variety of ways, as they are starting to be. This is something we can’t simply wait for. If we all sit around waiting, it’ll never happen.
The National Recycling Coalition has some interesting information for the economist in us all: “Recycling in the U.S. is a $236 billion a year industry. More than 56,000 recycling and reusing enterprises employ 1.1 million workers nationwide.” They also note that recycling creates demand for recycled products, “Recycling and buying recycled products creates demand for more recycled products, decreasing waste and helping our economy.”
That being said, the point of recycling is not to make or save money. It’s to conserve resources. According to the Recycling Association of Minnesota, in 2003 we were able to avoid using 232,000 tons of coal because we recycled (taking into account transportation, etc.).
Overall, I think it’s obvious that “Rethinking Recycling” fell short in a very fundamental way: it lacked any actual thinking. While recycling may not be as perfect as we’d like to think it is, to selectively recycle in the manner discussed in the article is simply ridiculous. I think with a little bit of research and a little bit of common sense, anyone can see that recycling all things eligible for recycling at the end of their useful life is imperative.