Picture a time still a century or two in the future. Your job is working in the mines. No, you’re not looking for gold or coal or diamonds or iron ore--you’re not even actually underground. You and countless others are sifting through the smelly belly of a landfill sealed shut a century earlier, recovering re-processable materials such as glass, plastic, and metal. Your society has finally exhausted nature’s stocks of raw materials to the point where digging through the garbage is more economic than scouring the land.
Your job is very dangerous due to the chemicals and leachates from other stuff also in the landfill--the site was never meant to be re-opened after its brief decade of operation. Somebody has to do it, though--it’s the only way to support the lazy habits of a throw-away society. Fortunately nothing has biodegraded over the ages in this oxygen-starved museum.
What went wrong with the solid waste management strategy of your ancestors? Certainly they recycled--or at least believed they were recycling. Actually, you’ve found whole caches of newspapers or glass bottles that were secretly dumped after curbside collection programs left cities with a commodity there was no good market for. Your ancestors’ government also did much to foster recycling, but it too only thought it was helping. Recycling was, at the time, one of the biggest myths that society fell for. That time was . . . now (the 1990’s).
There are good reasons to recycle and good reasons not to, but understanding the difference seems to have slipped by the wayside. Recycling is not particularly beneficial to the environment, does not save all that much energy or conserve resources, and costs significantly more than other garbage disposal options. The reason we recycle is because it is a feel-good act. Recycling does have a role in a solid solid waste management strategy, and can provide small environmental and economic benefits, but these are outweighed by the costs. In short, recycling is not all that we want to believe it is.
What’s come over us? In the last decade we’ve voiced new opinions on landfills, natural resources, recycling, the environment, and government involvement in these areas. Recycling seems to have been embraced as the cure-all for many troubles, especially in solid waste management and the area of environmentally sound policy, but it’s not. Recycling can serve both of these two primary roles, but we need to look more critically at how exactly recycling should fit these roles. First of all, let’s look at the other elements of a good solid waste management strategy--landfilling, incineration, and composting--in perspective before considering how to integrate recycling into the overall solution.
We’ve used the concept of a "dump" ever since garbage was invented as a byproduct of industrialization and urbanization one century ago. Society moved away from simple self-sufficiency of the farm to more elaborate life in the city, where fashion, availability of manufactured products, and amenities such as packaging created the first throw-away culture. The first dumps used to accommodate this new phenomenon of garbage were smelly, unsanitary, unsightly mounds of refuse which certainly no one wanted to live near. Modern-day landfills are vastly improved, but the bad reputation still clings to them. Landfills now are carefully planned to be in the most sensible hydrologic sites, and are constructed with double-layered liners to contain any leachates (Chilton 60). Landfills are planned with an operational life span of 10-20 years, then capped. The federal requirements for landfill operations make them so safe that the EPA estimates that the total risk from all the landfills in the nation equals one case of cancer every thirteen years (Boerner 15).
We are not facing a "landfill crisis. A survey of less than half of New York State found 200 square miles of hydrologically sound potential sites, enough to last 180 years at the shallow filling depth of 34 yards (Chilton 60). A more optimistic Seligman calculated that all the waste we will generate in the next 1,000 years would only occupy an area 100 yards deep and 30 miles square [900 square miles] (131). His figure is questionable, but it is exactly proportional, based on population, to the 180 year or more estimate for the surveyed fraction of New York state. Either way that leaves plenty of room.
Statistics of existing landfill capacity are meant to sound more ominous; for instance, California anticipates "running out" in 1999, and Illinois in 7-9 years (Chilton 58). The main obstacle to siting new landfills is not space, however, but local opposition (Boerner 15). The common person’s automatic, uninformed response "not in my back yard" has caused much unnecessary political friction and misperception of landfills. Landfilling as a solid waste management component deserves more credit than it’s received.
How would recycling affect landfilling? In 1992, 18% of the nation’s solid waste was recycled, while 62% was landfilled (most of the rest was incinerated) (Baker 30). If recycling were to suddenly increase by 50%, that would still leave 85% of the original amount of landfilled waste destined for the landfill, which might give a state like Illinois the 9 years instead of 7. In California the recycling rate is closer to 12%; it would have to jump to 50% to extend the current capacity of their landfills to 9 years (Chilton 58). To reiterate, landfills are quite effective and efficient; tremendous recycling isn’t necessary with respect to the imaginary "landfill crisis."
Natural resources are another topic that recycling benefits less than we think. Many of the resources we depend on most are renewable or abundantly available. Petroleum, from which plastics are made, is the least secure of any and it will still be gushing out of the ground for another 50-100 years. After that, we’ll have only to sift through older landfills to recover and recycle all the plastic we could ever need--it doesn’t biodegrade. Glass is made from silica, one of the most abundant elements--that’s what sand is mostly made of. Trees are technically a renewable resource, which will be increasingly renewed in the future. In many cases it is easier to make pulp from virgin fiber than to de-ink and decontaminate salvaged fiber. A de-inking plant for processing recycled newspaper costs about $60 million, and the process produces 1 ton of toxic sludge for every 2.5 tons of newsprint prepared for reuse. In fact, 13 of the 50 worst Superfund Cleanup priorities are recycling facilities (Schaumburg 32). If you consider the added costs to the environment of all the fuel, energy, water, and other resources consumed in the process of recycling, the environment doesn’t necessarily come off so well.
Materials that are exceptions to the above are generally already recycled because it is practical. Aluminum, for instance, is far more energy-efficient to recycle than to extract from bauxite ore. Cardboard also falls under this category (Chilton 60). Glass can sometimes be reused very effectively because recycled glass pellets and new silica can be mixed to require a lower refining temperature, saving energy.
Incineration is an option that is gaining some popularity as an alternative to landfilling or recycling, as indicated by the fact that 17% of the solid waste stream in 1992 was incinerated (Baker 30). Incineration is also an extremely clean method of waste disposal. Garbage is burned at 2300º F, reducing 650 tons of garbage a day to a small bag of ashes at the Brooks plant in Oregon (approximately 10% of original weight). At that temperature medical waste is thoroughly sterilized, and even plastics and other compounds that would ordinarily produce harmful gases when burned are completely decomposed. Metal is recovered magnetically and extensive scrubbers are used to maintain clean air output. The incinerator even burns up the odor of the garbage by drawing air in through the tipping floor. An added benefit is waste-to-energy production; the Brooks facility generates enough electricity to power itself plus a city the size of Woodburn. Incineration appeals to those who fear landfill space difficulties, but is more expensive than landfilling: in Oregon it is about $68 per ton compared with $34 per ton for landfilling, or roughly twice as much.
Composting is the last traditional method applied along with landfilling; the idea is that yard debris and leaves can do a lot more good where they can decompose rather than hogging volume in an airtight landfill. Around 3% of the 1992 solid waste stream was composted according to Baker (30). Unfortunately, only a few cities have set up separate collections for yard waste and found places to compost it once collected.
That’s the background on the main components of solid waste management, along with some ideas of the environmental impact of each. To the extent that garbage continues to be produced, those are the best ways to deal with it. However, garbage itself does not have to be accepted as a constant. A few common techniques which attack the problem from different angles masquerade under the catchy phrase "The 3 R’s"--Reduce, Re-use, and Recycle. For example, you can suppress garbage at the source by eliminating excess packaging (e.g. buying in bulk), or bypass garbage altogether by using durable containers (e.g. filling the same jar over and over with peanut butter at the store). Only as a last resort, something that can’t be re-used can undergo lower-level reprocessing and re-manufacturing--a process we call recycling. A combination of these three weapons not only makes us feel good, but can be effective in reducing garbage production.
Most of us have been brought up to value thriftiness in some form--perhaps you were required to eat all the food on your plate, or encouraged to save part of your allowance, or taught to mend broken things. As a result, we tend to feel a pang of guilt when we act wastefully. Opportunities to redeem our wastefulness consequently become important for us to feel good about ourselves. For some, it’s a token gesture to be able to say "I recycled;" for others it’s a perpetually important concern: the "recycling religion" (Seligman 131).
Of the three R’s, recycling is perhaps the easiest to participate in with minimal commitment or involvement--you simply dispose of your trash with a little added sorting and don’t have to remain loyal to it if you don’t want to. Because of this ease, recycling has been implemented on a large scale, sometimes even at considerable expense, to give us all a community-based feel-good program. Reducing and re-using are more complex and therefore slower in coming, but the government is willing to legislate on these ideals as well for political gain. In fact, government involvement and the economics of recycling are two of the most hotly debated topics on the recycling scene.
What is the true economic impact of recycling? Curbside recycling programs are the best representative examples of organized efforts, and are relatively easy to assess. Over 6,000 communities nationwide have already established such programs, enabling us to ascertain a comprehensive account of recycling’s successes and failures. Sadly, recycling consistently comes out more expensive than landfilling. On the surface, it appears that a typical curbside recycling program ends up costing about anywhere from $100 to $250 a ton, depending on participation and collection efficiency (Arrandale 62). In contrast, tipping fees (landfill costs) average between $20 and $90 depending on region (Baker 31). In the mid-Willamette Valley tipping fees are relatively low at about $35 per ton. For comparison, incineration cost about twice that: $68 a ton at the Brooks facility and up to $130 a ton elsewhere. One mistake that municipalities make in implementing a curbside recycling program is assuming that it will pay for itself (Baker 30). According to calculations by economist Grant W. Schaumburg, the average profit from the materials collected curbside is negative $4 per ton, or roughly zero. The average costs for separation, collection, processing, and administration add up to $185 a ton, a bit more than the $35 per ton that those recycled tons could have been buried for (31).
The above statistics can be misleading, however, depending on exactly what’s included in each cost figure. Tipping fees do not include the cost of collecting and hauling garbage (a figure I could not find anywhere), but even more confusing is accounting for hidden benefits in recycling. As Schaumburg points out, recycling is a big business because it redistributes a lot of money (31,32). Many people take a cut of that $185 per recycled ton, including waste management agencies, public relations companies, evaluators. As an Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) analysis put it, recycling creates jobs. Startlingly, the same EDF analysis also concluded that recycling has some arguable advantages toward reducing pollution and saving energy. In fact, the EDF came up with the surprising conclusion that a typical curbside recycling program saves at least $187 per ton in various forms of energy, a figure almost completely reversed from Schaumburg’s model (Baker 31). This shows that assessing the full dollar impact of recycling can be a nebulous science. Go figure!
A difficulty hindering stronger profit from recycling is that markets for recyclable materials are volatile and not effectively regulated. The market suffered heavily during the early ’90’s, as evident by dramatic changes in the tone of many magazine articles I read from different points between 1993 and 1996. During the worst of this depression, cities actually had to pay the recycling plants to take materials or the returns were insufficient to cover basic costs. The market recovered in 1995 and rates for newspaper, for example, jumped from $28 to $112 a ton (Baker 30). Baker goes on to say that cities should take advantage of the present period of "prosperity" to make the capital investments for a long-term stable recycling strategy, from collection trucks to uses for recyclable materials. Creating a steady demand for recycled material is necessary to make recycling work reliably under a free market.
What role should government have in imposing recycling? Opponents of recycling believe that a free market should determine when and where recycling is the most sensible idea economically, which would effectively eliminate any current programs that are partially subsidized by local, state, or federal dollars. However, government intervention may be the kick-start needed to create a viable economy in recycling. Many laws have been proposed or passed locally that help recycling in ways that the free market would not readily adapt to. These laws focus on manufacturer responsibility, requiring producers to embed the cost of recycling their product and packaging in the cost of those goods, thereby giving incentive for manufacturers to either reduce packaging or take responsibility for the environmental impact of it. More ambitious legislation would address the other of the three R’s by re-introducing re-useable containers to mainstream commerce. What it boils down to is a debate over laissez-faire recycling and whether or not reform in the over-packaging industry is important enough to merit tax dollars.
The last piece of the recycling puzzle is your involvement. What ultimately makes recycling worthwhile is your attitude toward it. To make recycling work, you have to support it through every phase. You have to take the responsibility to feed recyclable materials back into the re-processing stream, and then you have to "buy recycled" (Luoma 52). The success of recycling depends on a market for recycled goods, and the way to support that market is to patronize it. Go ahead and recycle because it makes you feel good. There’s nothing trivial in that motive. One student I interviewed put it perfectly when she said "I recycled today. It gave me a warm fuzzy feeling" (Chisholm). In the long run it will be worth it.
As mentioned earlier, recycling is a "last resort" for responsible consumerism. A better thing you can do is eliminate your contribution to the solid waste stream by reducing wasteful excesses and by re-using durable alternatives. Examples abound, from selecting products without frills or buying in bulk to finding ways to use what you have rather than buy new and dispose of the old. You need only to be alert. Take the challenge and start by finding one good way you can reduce or re-use, then share your idea with the people around you.
Even if you choose not to recycle, you don’t need to feel guilty. Maybe you have your own ways of feeling good without the institution of recycling. If so, there are acres and acres of future golf courses or even ski slopes waiting to be built atop each landfill as it reaches capacity. When recycling becomes economically essential, not just a good idea, it will move under its own power. We’ll have many stockpiles of unsorted garbage to fall back on if necessary, just buried and waiting for the call. Recycling is worthwhile if it is worth it to you personally. By making the choice to recycle now you risk seeming ahead of your time, but the choice remains yours, for now. Make it wisely.
Arrandale, T. "Sorting Out The Best Way To Run A Recycling Program." Governing May 1994: 62.
Baker, Beth. "Curbing Recycling Revisionists." Environmental Action Summer 1995: 29.
Boerner, C. and K. W. Chilton. "False Economy: The Folly Of Demand-Side Recycling." Environment January/February 1994: 6.
Chilton, K. W. "Recycling For Recycling's Sake: A Waste Of Time And Money." USA Today May 1993: 58.
Chisholm, April. Personal Interview. 21 February 1997.
Luoma, J. R. "Junk Your Ideas About Recycling." Redbook February 1993: 51.
Schaumburg, G. W., Jr. and K. T. Doyle. "Forced Recycling Costs Consumers". Consumer's Research Magazine April 1994: 30.
Seligman, D. "The Recycling Religion." Fortune 2 May 1994: 130.
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