From: Dickey, Michael F (michael_f_dickey@groton.pfizer.com)
Date: Thu Apr 04 2002 - 14:21:14 MST
I received this article from a friend which is basically saying that
recycling, overall, takes more energy and produces more waste then producing
materials from the raw resources. This got me thinking a little, how much
energy is required to produce an aluminum product from bauxite, to mine it,
ship it, process it, and make a can. Conversely, how much energy is used to
collect all those sparsely located aluminum cans throughout the urban sprawl
maze that is the US with big gas guzzling wasteful recycling collection
trucks. Aluminum cans are very light, but take up a lot of space, so a
comparable mass of aluminum cans vs. bauxite may be like 10 - 15 trucks of
cans carry as much aluminum as one truck of bauxite. The cans then must be
cleaned and melted, so how energy efficient is this process when taking into
account the collection of the cans? Aluminum cans are the shinning beacon
of the recycling mythos, what about Plastic products, newspapers, and steel?
This article is from Cato institute and has an obvious bias so it would be
nice to see some facts to figure it out either way. It would be interesting
if environmentalists were actually producing more waste and pollution by
recycling than by mining raw materials.
Michael
WASHINGTON
>
> NEW YORK CITY Mayor Mike Bloomberg, desperate to dig the city out of a
> $4.8 billion deficit, caused a minor uproar this past winter by
> recommending the elimination of the city's extravagant recycling
> program. In doing so, he ripped away the veil on one of the biggest
> boondoggles of recent times.
>
> For despite flowery promises and earnest intentions, mandatory
> municipal recycling programs have proven an expensive economic and
> environmental flop. Little now sustains this odd brand of civic
> religion beyond the quasi-religious devotion of the green faithful.
>
> While environmentalists argue that recycling was never about saving
> money, that's little more than revisionist history. You couldn't swing
> a dead cat within the halls of state government over the past decade
> or two without hitting some well-meaning activist carrying on about
> the economic gains that would accrue to those who mined our garbage
> for valuable resources rather than burying it in some landfill.
>
> New York is but the latest of the growing number of cities that have
> found that the cost of recycling garbage is far, far greater than the
> cost of simply dumping it.
>
> And therein lies an important but overlooked point. Prices reflect
> relative scarcity. Things that have high prices are relatively scarce
> and things that have low prices are relatively abundant.
>
> If it costs X to deliver newly made plastic to the market, for
> example, but it costs 10X to deliver reused plastic to the market,
> then we can conclude that the resources required to recycle plastic
> are 10 times scarcer than the resources required to make plastic from
> scratch. And because recycling is supposed to be about conserving
> resources, mandating recycling under those circumstances will do more
> harm than good.
>
> If the wood, sand or various metals that we're supposedly rescuing via
> recycling were actually in danger of running out, they have a funny
> way of showing it. Prices for wood and metals are falling -- not
> rising -- and have done so for over a century. The same holds true for
> energy (something else that is supposedly conserved through
> recycling).
>
> Moreover, it's the energy costs associated with recycling -- the
> additional collection services, shipping costs, and industrial
> processing necessary to tear apart a newspaper, for instance, into
> reusable material -- that contribute to its high costs.
>
> Likewise baseless is the worry that we're running out of landfill
> space. If we need more, we can build more. There's plenty of land to
> go around. Gonzaga University economist Clark Wiseman calculates that
> a 15-square-mile landfill could handle 1,000 years' worth of America's
> present waste-disposal needs.
>
> Nor should we be worried much about the environmental problems
> associated with landfills. Today's landfills are super high-tech
> tombs; little gets in and little comes out. Environmental Protection
> Agency regulations now ensure than landfills cause only one additional
> cancer risk every 13 years. And that's assuming that we use such
> worst-case scenarios and assumptions that even that figure, according
> to most risk-assessment specialists, probably overestimates the actual
> risk by 100 to 1,000 times.
>
> Given the state-of-the-art technology required of modern
> waste-disposal facilities, the environmental-health risks are
> effectively zero. In fact, recycling is almost certainly worse for the
> environment than landfilling.
>
> After all, extracting usable raw material from a manufactured product
> is an industrial activity every bit as involved as combining various
> raw materials to make a product. Both are energy and chemically
> intensive. And both create waste.
>
> Recycling 100 tons of old newsprint, for instance, generates tons of
> toxic waste. Is this consequential? Sure. The EPA reported some years
> ago that 13 of the 50 worst Superfund sites are, or were, recycling
> facilities.
>
> Finally, we're constantly told that recycling creates jobs. But let's
> face it, these are miserable jobs at miserable wages, and we've got
> plenty of those.
>
> Moreover, the argument doesn't tell us about the jobs that aren't
> being created because New York City is taking $57 million a year out
> of the economy (actually, about $103 million once you account for the
> deadweight losses associated with the tax system) to pay for this
> make-work labor. Banning farm machinery would create a lot of jobs
> too, but nobody in their right mind would advocate that.
>
> Why, then, do we entertain this brand of that same nonsense? When
> recycling makes economic sense, government doesn't have to mandate it
> or subsidize it. Somebody in the private sector would be happy to pay
> you for your garbage or, alternatively, charge you less for recycling
> services than for landfilling services.
>
> If people want to recycle regardless -- simply because it makes them
> feel better about themselves -- that's their right. But let them spend
> their own time and money to do it.
>
> Jerry Taylor is director of natural resource studies at the Cato
> Institute (www.cato.org).
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