recycled trash |

Take an empty beer bottle. We can either throw that glass bottle away or recycle it.

Assume for a moment that we all want what’s best for the planet. Assume, therefore, that we want to use as few resources as possible.

Should we recycle our beer bottle, then? Or should we throw it away?

And how do we know?

Do we believe the Al Gore’s of the world, who assert what we should do, for no other reason than that they assert it? Or do we look into the actual data ourselves?

Ask yourself this:

If recycling is more expensive than using new materials, can it really be more efficient?

The free market prices its resources by what’s called opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost is not arbitrary.

It means that producers won’t choose packaging which costs more if that packaging is identical (or inferior) to other options.

For years now, many of you have spent thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours sorting, washing, de-labeling, and resorting bottles so that these bottles could be recycled.

The horrible truth of the matter is that most of these hours have been a complete waste, the very thing you sought to avoid.

But more than that: the environment is worse off because of your efforts.

Most of the glass you’ve worked hard to have recycled is now resting in some landfill – via a very circuitous, and very costly, route.

That’s a fact.

Here are a few more:

Recycled glass is called cullet.

The process of producing cullet consists of grinding up glass, which in turn requires machines and much electricity.

Recycling glass is a thoroughly industrial process, make no mistake.

Cullet glass is full of additives, contaminants, and impurities, most of which are trapped within the cullet, so that they remain harmless. If, however, someone again melts the glass, which is precisely what happens when it is recycled, these contaminants are released into the earth, water, and air.

Different colored glasses cannot be merged for bottles.

Mixed cullet is, for the most part, useless.

Clear glass and green glass are usually landfilled.

Glass broken beyond a certain point is landfilled.

Amber glass is the only recyclable glass that’s remotely in demand.

Silica – also known as sand, which is what glass is made of – is exceptionally cheap and exceptionally abundant.

Silica production is not a danger to the environment, by any standard. Indeed, silica is made into glass without any extra steps or expense, unlike recycled glass, which is much more involved and much more environmentally unfriendly.

That is why virgin glass is cheaper than cullet glass. It also, incidentally, provides you with a critical clue into something you should know the next time you ponder whether to throw your bottles into the trash, or into the recycling bin.

If cullet glass is more expensive and also more toxic, and if cullet glass usually ends up in landfills anyway, why, then, do we bother recycling glass?

A good question, for which, unfortunately, there is no good answer.

Here, however, are some of the bad ones:

“Recycling is always cheaper, no matter how much it costs in terms of those Federal Reserve notes you call money,” say a number of my critics.

And:

“Silica mining rapes Mother Earth.”

You can certainly believe this nonsense if you like, and I, for one, will certainly never convince you otherwise, no matter the evidence.

But you should be aware of how much more waste you’re creating, and how much more you are polluting the environment.

You can also believe, as many never tire of telling me, that “recycling has a spiritual component,” which in turn gives recycled products “special value that price cannot measure.”

But I’m speaking to those of you who have not yet been blinded by the environmental dogma:

If price is a reliable indicator – and it is – then the majority of recycling is incontrovertibly irrational.

It is worth noting that many American cities, though explicitly “green,” have nevertheless come to see what for many of us has been blindingly obvious for years: glass recycling is an utter waste. It’s a waste of time, and it’s a waste of resources and money. Furthermore, it’s bad for the environment.

That is why many American cities have wisely done away with glass recycling – green glass in particular, which is so plentiful that it’s ridiculous to recycle it, and the cullet market for which is so overwhelmed by an excess supply that recycling it costs big time, in every way, because so much of it is ultimately landfilled.

There are, of course, a number of other cities that “have tried to delete green glass from the list of recyclable materials, but face a political veto from recycling enthusiasts. And, interestingly, the political opposition comes precisely from those people who will end up paying more for the inefficiency of the recycling they insist they want. Taxpayers, citizens, the folks who take their garbage out to the street, want to ask the city to put green glass back on the recyclable list, regardless of the cost” (Michael Munger, “Think Globally, Act Irrationally: Recycling”).

The Coors Recycling Plant is where all recyclable glass in the entire Colorado region goes. An employee there, who requested anonymity, told me this:

“A great deal of what has been sorted for recycling does end up being landfilled, despite what you hear, because of contamination or lack of market for the recycled material.”

How much?

“Don’t ask.”

One estimate: less than half.

Another estimate: less than a third.

Another: less than a quarter.

Conservatively, this means that if 80,000 tons are hauled for recycling, about 40,000 tons ends up in a landfill.

To put that into perspective:

Rather than throw your bottles into the trash and then pay one of our fine local haulers to take that trash to the dump, as we used to do in the good old days before the religion of environmentalism swept across the country like a plague, we are now paying our local government, in the form of subsidies, so that we can now spend thousands upon thousands of hours cleaning, de-labeling, sorting, and resorting glass, so that we can then pay for more trucks to pump more pollution into the air and use more fossil fuels in the process, so that finally our bottles can be hauled a couple of hundred miles (roundtrip), so that they can then, at last, be landfilled.

That is the beauty of green politics and all their profligate governmental bureaucracies.

That is our earth-friendly greens at their finest.

It is also sheer madness.

Ask yourself another question:

How has such a fraud been perpetrated?

Answer: the neo-Marxist philosophy of environmentalism and your tacit sanction of that philosophy.

Recycling “feels good,” for instance.

It has a “spiritual component.”

Recycling “simply must be better for the environment.”

Humans are a blight upon the earth.

Reader, you’re being lied to.

You’ve been brainwashed into believing that throwing away your Heinenken bottles will destroy the planet.

If you only hear a single thing that I’m saying, let it be this: if something is viable, it will never need to be subsidized.

If subsidies are called for, that thing is wrong.

Recycling must by necessity be subsidized because it is inherently wasteful. When recycling is not wasteful, it’s done voluntarily, as it’s been done since the dawn of humankind.

If you doubt this, read Rubbish, by one of our foremost rubbish experts, Doctor William Rathje.

And remember this also:

“There is a simple test for determining whether something is a resource (something valuable) or just garbage (something you want to dispose of at the lowest possible cost, including costs to the environment). If someone will pay you for the item, it’s a resource. Or, if you can use the item to make something else people want, and do it at lower price or higher quality than you could without that item, then the item is also a resource. But if you have to pay someone to take the item away, or if other things made with that item cost more or have lower quality, then the item is garbage” (Michael Munger, “Think Globally, Act Irrationally: Recycling”).

Read Part One of this article here.

January 21, 2010May 6, 2017

Recycled Trash

Few arguments are more dangerous than the ones that “feel” right but can’t be justified (Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981).

Paradoxically, recycled trash is exactly what you get 99 times out of 100 when the sacred subject of recycling comes up.

Recycling is the process whereby rubbish is converted into reusable materials.

Recycling — once known as scavenging — is as old as mankind herself, and it has always been a way dealing with waste products. But it was once a decision left up to individuals, and not coercive governmental institutions.

Rubbish is an inescapable by-product of human life.

At present, there are only three possible ways of dealing with rubbish: dumping, incinerating, or recycling.

One of the primary forces behind the push for so much mandatory recycling is utter ignorance about the extent to which spontaneous recycling occurs in the private sector.

In the words of one of our foremost rubbish expert, Doctor William Rathje, of the University of Arizona:

“As long as mankind has been throwing away trash, others have sifted through it.”

What this translates to is this:

When recycling makes sense, as it does with scrap steel and aluminum cans, it makes sense not because of resource scarcity, which is not a problem, nor because extracting the resources will irreparably harm the environment (it won’t), but because it is economically tenable to do so.

Businesses in free-market countries exist to recycle these products. And they’ve existed for many, many decades.

Furthermore, no one is being forced to save recyclables, or to take them away.

A few other things about recycling you’ll most likely never hear from the environmental contingent:

Forests in developed countries are not mowed down to produce paper, and recycling paper does not “save forests”: pulpwood is grown and farmed specifically for paper, as this quondam forester makes unequivocally clear.

Thus in the long run mandatory recycling laws hurt people and the economy, for when demand declines, farmers stop growing pulpwood trees. And since recycled paper often requires more energy to make, it is often more expensive.

In addition, de-inking newspapers, which is necessary in order to recycle them, may create a toxic sludge not at all good for the environment, which sludge, toxic or not, must somewhere be landfilled.

Because recycling ignores the law of supply and demand, recycled material is very often landfilled – as, to cite one of many examples, shortly after enacting its mandatory recycling laws, the German government admitted (Recycling’ Demand Side: “Lessons from Germany’s Green Dot”).

“[We] are running out of ways to dispose of our waste in a manner that keeps it out of either sight or mind,” said Nobel Prize winner Albert Gore, a statement contradicted by every shred of hard data on this subject.

For example:

“If we permitted rubbish to reach the height it did at New York’s Fresh Kills site (255 feet), a landfill that would hold all of America’s garbage for the next century would still be only about 10 miles on a side” (Lomborg, 2001).

And:

During the 1980s, the waste disposal industry moved to using larger landfills, partly because of new EPA regulations and partly because of consolidations and mergers. At the same time, the number of operating landfills fell sharply. The EPA, the press, and a variety of other commentators focused on the number of landfills, rather than on their capacity, which was growing rapidly, and concluded that we were running out of space. J. Winston Porter, the EPA Assistant Administrator responsible for that agency’s role in creating the appearance of a garbage crisis, has since admitted that the key EPA study was flawed because it counted landfills rather than landfill capacity, and it also underestimated the prospects for creating additional capacity. Allen Geswein, an EPA official and one of the authors of the EPA study, remarked, ‘I’ve always wondered where that crap about a landfill-capacity crisis came from’ (Bailey 1995, A8).

Even the notoriously leftist EPA acknowledges that risk to life from modern landfills is “virtually nonexistent.”

The truth is, there is no shortage of landfill space, not remotely. All the trash produced by the United States for the next one thousand years could fit into a landfill forty-four miles square by 120 feet deep – one tenth of 1 percent of all this country’s entire land area. (“A Consumer’s Guide to Environmental Myths and Realities,” Clark Wiseman, Gonzaga University.)

“Recycling laws could eliminate the one-pound coffee ‘brick packs’ you now find in retail stores. These packages hold the same amount of coffee as metal cans, but weigh less than one-third of traditional metal cans, and they take up little space. Recycled-content laws would force the use of cans instead” (Facts not Fear).

Transporting recyclables requires separate collection trucks. In addition to which, producing finished recycled goods consumes a great deal of energy and also causes pollution, every bit as much as producing, for example, paper from pulpwood.

“In Los Angles, curbside recycling means that the city had to have eight hundred rather than four hundred trucks to pick up trash. And that city already has an air pollution problem” (Ibid).

Rubbish is indeed an inescapable by-product of human life. Yet according to Richard Denison of the Environmental Defense Fund: “Garbage is intolerable in a free society.”

Humans, in other words, must live as ghosts, because the religion of environmentalism finds the by-products of human existence “intolerable.”

Concerning the question of which method creates the most pollution:

“It is almost beyond dispute that manufacturing products from recyclables instead of from virgin raw materials” (making, for instance, paper out of old newspapers instead of virgin timber) “causes less pollution and imposes fewer burdens on the earth’s natural habitat and biodiversity,” says the Natural Resources Defense Council.

And yet:

This assumption is not merely beyond dispute; it is wrong in many instances. Recycling is a manufacturing process, and therefore it too has environmental impact. The U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (1989, 191) says that it is ‘usually not clear whether secondary manufacturing [such as recycling] produces less pollution per ton of material processed than primary manufacturing processes.’ Indeed, the Office of Technology Assessment goes on to explain why: Recycling changes the nature of pollution, sometimes increasing it and sometimes decreasing it. For example, the EPA examined both virgin paper processing 18 PERC POLICY SERIES and recycled paper processing for toxic substances. Five toxic substances were found only in virgin processes, eight only in recycling processes, and twelve in both processes. Among these twelve, all but one was present in higher levels in the recycling processes (Office of Technology Assessment 1989, 191). Similar mixed results have been found for steel and aluminum production. Indeed, over the past twenty years, a large body of literature devoted to life-cycle analyses of products from their birth to death has repeatedly found that recycling can increase pollution as well as decrease it (Daniel K. Benjamin, “Eight Great Myths of Recycling”).

Reader, at the very least know this:

Nothing is ever truly recycled until it has been sorted, remanufactured, and repurchased.

Thus, one must not just blindly advocate a categorical policy of recycling, recycling, recycling — by compulsion, if necessary — without any regard for what the market will bear.

This only creates tons more waste, which is one of the many reasons that mandatorily recycled garbage is so often landfilled.

So much for the inane claim that “economics have nothing to do with the environment.”

This, like recycling and a host of other issues, is just so much more environmental trash.

Read Part 2 of this article Glass Recycling here.