It’s always been a pointless scam, and it’s becoming ever more clear. As Glenn has noted, all the sorting and binning is mostly a religious ritual.
4 thoughts on “Recycling”
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It’s always been a pointless scam, and it’s becoming ever more clear. As Glenn has noted, all the sorting and binning is mostly a religious ritual.
Comments are closed.
I would not go so far as to call all recycling a scam – metals and glass are infinitely recyclable, if the prices are right (and they almost always are for metals). But residential recycling (almost) all about feeling good or assuaging our guilt for the disposable society we’ve become.
The problem is that people don’t know what happens to their trash after they put it on the curb. You can’t convince people that recycling doesn’t save energy, money, or resources if no one knows about what happens to the trash. It also doesn’t matter as many people believe the extra cost in terms of money and energy are worth it to preserve resources.
When we lived in Seattle we faced heavy fines if we did not segregate our trash properly. The city even paid for and distributed color coded bins to help separate paper, plastics, metals, glass, and organics. The real outrage, however, was that the city failed to get the unionized trash pickup to cooperate, as they wanted more money in order to update their trucks to handle the separated garbage. So the pickup crews dumped all of the bins into the same space on the trucks, yet the heavy fines remained in place if we didn’t separate out our trash on the curb.
Mandatory recycling is a bad solution to a real problem.
The real problem is this: waste disposal is deliberately underpriced to reduce the incentive for illegal dumping. But this means waste is overproduced relative to what the free market would determine. Recycling is a patch to try to reduce the cost of subsidized landfills.
A better solution, in my opinion, would be a tax on goods reflecting their cost of disposal. This tax would be used to operate landfills. If materials are instead recycled the embodied disposal fee could be refunded.