New York City therefore exports almost all of its trash to places outside of the city. Proponents of recycling will probably agree that using valuable NYC land as a landfill is inefficient. I’ve seen proponents also make claims that shipping out all of this trash is wasteful and inefficient too, so we should think about recycling a lot of the solid waste we generate. Sounds good, but think about this for a moment.

1. Recycling solid waste and not shipping it out to landfills requires the construction of facilities within New York City to manage and process the recyclable material. If using these very same resources and plots of land for landfill and disposal is wasteful and inefficient, how could it then be deemed “efficient” to use that very same land and resources for … disposal of solid waste (albeit a different kind of disposal). It cannot be. The point being that dedicating land area in, say, Greenwich Village to either recycling or solid waste disposal would seem to be a poor use of that space. What makes displacement of a museum or restaurant or apartment by a recycling plant (spewing out very pleasant fumes and effluent too!) any better or worse than if it was an incinerator or a disposal site?
2. Suppose you disagree with the first point above. Further, suppose that 100% of municipal solid waste is recyclable, so that all of the trash generated by New Yorkers is collected in New York and stays in New York and is processed in New York City recycling plants. Further, assume that recycling materials uses no resources, consumes no fuels, emits no pollution, etc. we just magically insert it into a Sneetch Machine and the thing is recycled and ready for its new use. What happens to those materials now? Well, the recycled bottles and cans need to be filled up with more beer, soda, milk and 5-hour energy. The recycled paper needs to be packaged and made into pads, stickies, newspaper, boxes, etc. The recycled plastics and rubber need to be turned into playground mats, car seats, etc. Are these production facilities located in New York City? No. Virtually none of them are in New York City, and so we still need to take all of these materials and ship them all over the world to be put to their final use, and then we’d see them shipped right back into New York for consumption again. Now, so long as prices accurately reflect all costs, I have no problem with this … but proponents of recycling ignore the costs of doing all of this when they popularly support such notions. By not putting MSW into landfills we are not magically saving all of these costs, we are changing where they are felt and perhaps making them a little less easy to see. But they are there. They are real. And they could very well be much larger than the costs of MSW disposal, even without including the environmental and resource costs of the recycling reprocessing processes themselves.
3. Some will claim that shipping all kinds of “waste” outside of NYC is wasteful and inefficient because it consumes fuel resources and produces pollutants. OK. But then couldn’t one argue that shipping all this “stuff” in in the first place is just as wasteful. Think about it. I buy orange juice that was squeezed and boxed in Florida. People tell me it is wasteful to take the empty carton and send it out of New York City. So wouldn’t the bringing into the city of that very same carton also be wasteful according to this line of thinking? It would have to be. I don’t eat the carton, and there are only so many arts and crafts projects I can do with my children. Thus, if I want orange juice, then this carton will have to be a part of that process. We’ve talked about pricing, the profit motive and property rights elsewhere, but if you want to argue that firms use “too much” cardboard to make their orange juice, what do you think that is telling us about their incentives? If you want to argue that consumers do not consider the cost of the carton when making their OJ purchases, what do you think the source of this “problem” is? And if you want to argue that we are all aware of all of this, but that the disposal is not priced properly, ask what the source of that problem is? And if you want to argue that OJ prices are not high enough to capture all of the external costs imposed on us from evil cardboard juice cartons, then ask, “are there no taxes already?” and how high would taxes have to be in order for you to agree that the “external cost has been paid for?” We’ve addressed all of these in earlier posts.

Generally these questions are asking what the real “disposal” problem is. Is it “not recycling” or is it something else? You may read the above as an “anti-recycling” post if you want, but that would be a poor interpretation of what I am trying to say.

Let’s start with the simplest of all ideas. On occasion, I receive e-mails with this as the tagline/signature:

Save paper – Please do not print this e-mail unless you need to!

What do the laws of economics tell us about whether recycling paper, or even not printing paper at all, will necessarily “save” trees? It is not clear at all that recycling or not printing saves trees. Remember the law of supply. Think about why we have so many chickens today as compared to Bison or Bengal Tigers. It is pretty certain that if you found a way to “recycle” chickens the number of chickens in the world would not increase, and is very probably going to decrease. Think about what printing and using lots of paper does. It incentivizes producers to produce more inputs to make paper – in other words, if end users want lots of paper, then paper companies need to figure out ways to supply more wood pulp, and usually they do this by planting more trees than they cut down every year. So, if you are worried about “saving trees” you would do well to ignore the e-mail tagline. Not only that, you might even want to proselytize the opposite. Indeed, others in the blogosphere have offered, with tongue only slightly in cheek, that the best way to save the Bengal Tiger is to start eating them.

A few extra observations.

I recognize that biologists argue that managed/planted forests are not as diverse as “virgin” ones. But this brings up an issue beyond the point of this question for now. My experience with self-professed “E”nvironmentalists is that they really have no interest whatsoever about whether trees remain standing or not. How could they? If they did, they would at least have to have paused once or twice to ask if recycling paper is a good way to achieve their objective, if at all. But they do no such thing. Just remember the religious zeal with which people claim that “recycling is obviously good” to get a sense for the point I am making. It suggests to me a motivation similar to all of the anti-capitalist rhetoric that is out there which uses high minded, moral sounding ideals to shroud an entirely different motivation. In this case, “E”nvironmentalists are imposing their preferences on others, forcing others to become part of the movement by mandating recycling, and perhaps even to use this idea to discredit entrepreneurial commercial society.

I’ve posted this before, but because it is very likely that recycling paper does not save trees, in fact it is probable that it reduces the amount of trees than would otherwise have prevailed, does that mean you should make it your mission to print any and everything you possibly can … and to throw it all into the regular trash? Is that what I am advocating when I question the wisdom of paper recycling programs? Two things will help you reflect on it:

(1) Because I know rent-control is a really bad way to help the poor find housing, does that mean I am advocating for the poor to live in appliance boxes and starve to death?

(2) Do you know why throwing rocks through windows is not good for the local economy?

At the margin, you can think of recycling programs as lowering the cost of producing recycled materials. But if you do that, it is the same as increasing the relative benefit “producers” can get from producing recycled materials. In other words, programs like “free” curbside recycling, especially when put side by side with trash that must be paid for, may actually incentivize people to do more recycling than just taking stuff out of the trash and putting it into recycle bins. It is entirely plausible that not only do I substitute by putting bottles into the recycle bin instead of the trash, but that two more effects happen. First, when shopping, instead of buying products with packaging I might have thrown out, I now buy products that can have packaging recycled. But most important is the second effect, if now the total cost of my trash/waste/bottle/packaging disposal is lower, then I might increase my overall consumption of goods – both recyclable and not. In other words, the presence of zero cost recycling programs may end up having us generate more waste than without the recycling program (and of course, the distorted prices here make it hard to tell when and what should be disposed of and recycled in the first place).

Paying people to recycle, as I argue we might want to do, would actually exacerbate this “problem.” This is all a tangled way of arguing that there are possible unintended consequences of curbside recycling programs, aside from the standard consequences (e.g. the added environmental costs of the extra trucks to collect materials and the processing of these materials and shipment of the materials to new end users). An analogy would certainly clarify. There are charities in the world dedicated to mitigating the problem of slavery in modern Africa. One strategy some groups pursue is to “redeem” slaves – i.e. to pay for the freedom of existing slaves.

In a static world, that sounds like a great idea – for every slave’s freedom we buy, that is one less person remaining in bondage. However, the world is not static, and people respond to this newly found source of income. Since it is now more remunerative to enslave people, the act of redemption would incentivize slave “producers” to enslave more people. This is, in fact, what seems to have happened.

Does it mean we ought not recycle? No. But it does mean that sensible and serious evaluations of recycling programs consider these incentives and the attendant costs when evaluating the implementation of new programs and the success of existing programs.

Even if my time were not valuable, this is seeming to me to become more and more of an insane activity. Why? If doing this were so valuable, and so important, how come I am not getting paid to do it? It seems to be a neat racket … someone has figured out a way to tap the reserve army of workers to their advantage, and it doesn’t seem like it is the greedy capitalist caricature either.

The garbage problem is that one of the primary reasons people are urged and sometimes coerced into recycling is this notion that we are drowning beneath mountains of trash – soon all that will remain of our planet are vast National Parks of Garbage. This is flat out ridiculous. I don’t think many of the recycaholics ever sat down to do some math.

• Americans produce about 250 million tons of municipal solid waste each year. Though we have been producing less and less waste for each unit of output we produce, let’s make the assumption that we will produce double this amount, per year, for the rest of eternity (unlikely, since waste is costly, and greedy producers can increase their profits by reducing how much waste is produced along with their products).
• Each ton of waste consists roughly of two cubic yards by volume (this is a mid-point, if trash were compacted first, it would be far, far smaller than this amount – but let’s be generous).
• So, the 500 million tons of waste we hypothetically produce each year in the future are the equivalent of one billion cubic yards of waste. That’s a heckuva lot of garbage! … or is it?
• This is the equivalent of a volume of waste that is 20 million square yards in area and 150 feet deep (the larger landfills are much deeper than this, over 200 feet in some places).
• Doing a little conversion, each year then, we produce enough trash to fill a 4132 acre hole to a depth of 150 feet.
• This means, that if we produce this much every year for the next 1,000 years (an entire millennium), then we will produce enough garbage to fill a 4.1 million acre hole to a depth of 150 feet! That’s enormous … but just how enormous is it?
• Doing a little algebra, we can see that over the course of the next 1,000 years, if we produce TWICE as much trash as we are producing today, in total, we would be able to fill a hole with garbage that is 150 feet deep and 80 miles on each side (if it is a square).

That might sound like a big hole, but there are vast tracts of land in the Midwest and Western US, and in particular in Alaska, where a piece of land that size is thought to be quaint. Alaska has 656,425 square miles of land, most of it completely barren. The amount of trash we would produce would make up less than 1% of the land there. Yes, that is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware, but they are small places. It is also larger than Rochester or whatever neighborhood you happen to live in.

There might be fantastic reasons to recycle (greenhouse gas worries, chemical worries, etc.) but one of those reasons most certainly cannot be because there is no place to put our trash.  That is just some ridiculous trash talking.