The Pragmatics of Recycling

You get the feeling that you are “doing your part” to contribute to creating a less wasteful society. The Pope’s recent encyclical tells us to hold waste in disdain and take care of our “Home” (earth), that our profligate consumer practices are unsustainable, reflections of a spoiled society with way too many material goods. The media show us pictures of the ultra-poor, particularly in developing nations, where hordes rummage through massive landfills and waste dumps looking for food, clothing and their vision of “treasure.”

And so I was most shocked when New York Times Science writer, John Tierney, wrote a very-well reasoned and researched piece in they NY Times Sunday Review (October 3/4) challenging the practice, at least in well-developed countries, as costly, ineffective and itself wasteful. Recycling isn’t justified? Huh? All those mandates from so many municipalities to separate organics from metals and plastics are wrong? Society is not better off by reason of such efficiencies? What? They’re not even efficiencies? He suggests that a tax of $15/ton on landfill deposits would do a world of good, well above current recycling efforts. I had to read more.

Tierney writes: “While it’s true that the recycling message has reached more people than ever, when it comes to the bottom line, both economically and environmentally, not much has changed at all [from years of recycling efforts and mandates]… Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of loweroil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies. The mood is so gloomy that one industry veteran tried to cheer up her colleagues this summer with an article in a trade journal titled, ‘Recycling Is Not Dead!’

“While politicians set higher and higher goals, the national rate of recycling has stagnated in recent years. Yes, it’s popular in affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and in cities like San Francisco, but residents of the Bronx and Houston don’t have the same fervor for sorting garbage in their spare time.

“The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. ‘If you believe recycling is good for the planet and that we need to do more of it, then there’s a crisis to confront,’ says David P. Steiner, the chief executive officer of Waste Management, the largest recycler of household trash in the United States. ‘Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected. We need to ask ourselves: What is the goal here?’”

Tierney drills down into statistics and cost-benefit analyses to prove his point: “To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000.

“Even those statistics might be misleading. New York and other cities instruct people to rinse the bottles before putting them in the recycling bin, but the E.P.A.’s life-cycle calculation doesn’t take that water into account. That single omission can make a big difference, according to Chris Goodall, the author of ‘How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.’ Mr. Goodall calculates that if you wash plastic in water that was heated by coal-derived electricity, then the net effect of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere…

“The national rate of recycling rose during the 1990s to 25 percent, meeting the goal set by an E.P.A. official, J. Winston Porter. He advised state officials that no more than about 35 percent of the nation’s trash was worth recycling, but some ignored him and set goals of 50 percent and higher. Most of those goals were never met and the national rate has been stuck around 34 percent in recent years.

“‘It makes sense to recycle commercial cardboard and some paper, as well as selected metals and plastics,’ he says. ‘But other materials rarely make sense, including food waste and other compostables. The zero-waste goal makes no sense at all — it’s very expensive with almost no real environmental benefit.’

“One of the original goals of the recycling movement was to avert a supposed crisis because there was no room left in the nation’s landfills. But that media-inspired fear was never realistic in a country with so much open space. In reporting the 1996 article I found that all the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing. And that tiny amount of land wouldn’t be lost forever, because landfills are typically covered with grass and converted to parkland, like the Freshkills Park being created on Staten Island. The United States Open tennis tournament is played on the site of an old landfill — and one that never had the linings and other environmental safeguards required today.

“Though most cities shun landfills, they have been welcomed in rural communities that reap large economic benefits (and have plenty of greenery to buffer residents from the sights and smells). Consequently, the great landfill shortage has not arrived, and neither have the shortages of raw materials that were supposed to make recycling profitable.  

“With the economic rationale gone, advocates for recycling have switched to environmental arguments. Researchers have calculated that there are indeed such benefits to recycling, but not in the way that many people imagine… Most of these benefits do not come from reducing the need for landfills and incinerators. A modern well-lined landfill in a rural area can have relatively little environmental impact. Decomposing garbage releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, but landfill operators have started capturing it and using it to generate electricity. Modern incinerators, while politically unpopular in the United States, release so few pollutants that they’ve been widely accepted in the eco-conscious countries of Northern Europe and Japan for generating clean energy.

“Moreover, recycling operations have their own environmental costs, like extra trucks on the road and pollution from recycling operations. Composting facilities around the country have inspired complaints about nauseating odors, swarming rats and defecating sea gulls. After New York City started sending food waste to be composted in Delaware, the unhappy neighbors of the composting plant successfully campaigned to shut it down last year.”

So what’s the answer? Perhaps it’s in not having so much garbage in the first place. Perhaps, as conscientious citizens, we need to take a big bad look at our own consumption practices, altering our buying patterns accordingly. Some cities (like Los Angeles) require grocery shoppers to use their own permanent shopping bags. California is also being forced to drill down on another huge consumption problem: water. The pragmatics here are forcing Californians to take a good hard look at what they do at the consumption level, well before the challenges of waste disposal must be addressed. Maybe that is what that Papal encyclical is saying, and maybe that’s where most of us can really do better. That and a landfill tax of $15/ton!

I’m Peter Dekom, and challenging our assumptions along the way is a necessary part of social and economic evolution.