Talk:Recycling/Criticisms

Added

• Economist Steven Landsburg has suggested that the sole benefit of reducing landfill space is trumped by the energy needed and resulting pollution from the recycling process.

• Economist Steven Landsburg has claimed that paper recycling actually reduces tree populations. He argues that because paper companies have incentives to replenish the forests they own, large demands for paper lead to large forests. Conversely, reduced demand for paper leads to fewer "farmed" forests.

• Public policy analyst James V. DeLong points out that recycling is a manufacturing process and many of the methods use more energy than they save. In addition to energy usage, he notes that recycling requires capital and labor while producing some waste. These processes need to be more efficient than production from original raw material and/or traditional garbage disposal in order for recycling to be the superior method.

Information already included

• Others, however, have calculated through life cycle assessment that producing recycled paper uses less energy and water than harvesting, pulping, processing, and transporting virgin trees.

• In many cases the cost of recyclable materials also exceeds the cost of raw materials. Virgin plastic resin costs 40% less than recycled resin.

• Critics often argue that while recycling may create jobs, they are often jobs with low wages and terrible working conditions.

Deliberately omitting

This particular fact doesn't seem too relevant, but the article has a lot more that can be mined

• In a 1996 article for The New York Times, John Tierney argued that it costs more money to recycle the trash of New York City than it does to dispose of it in a landfill. Tierney argued that the recycling process employs people to do the additional waste disposal, sorting, inspecting, and many fees are often charged because the processing costs used to make the end product are often more than the price gained from its sale. Tierney also referenced a study conducted by the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) that found in the six communities involved in the study, "all but one of the curbside recycling programs, and all the composting operations and waste-to-energy incinerators, increased the cost of waste disposal."

Omitted due to bad statistics:

• Additionally, an EPA study that tracked the price of clear cullet from July 15 to August 2, 1991, found that the average cost per ton ranged from $40 to $60, while a USGS report shows that the cost per ton of raw silica sand from years 1993 to 1997 fell between $17.33 and $18.10.

1. The average price over two weeks is being compared to a price drop over five years
2. The price drop is not referenced to an absolute price (A $20 drop from $50 is very different than a $20 drop from $500)

Source link is dead, same point already added

• Similar arguments were expressed in a 1995 article for The Free Market.

Source is a copy of the NYT article mention above, from which more needs to be added.

• In some prosperous and many less prosperous countries in the world, the traditional job of recycling is performed by the entrepreneurial poor such as the Karung guni, the Rag and bone man, Waste picker, and junk man as parodied in Steptoe and Son and Sanford and Son. With the creation of large recycling organizations that may be profitable, either by law or economies of scale[1][2], the poor are more likely to be driven out of the recycling and the remanufacturing market. To compensate for this loss of income to the poor, a society may need to create additional forms of societal programs to help support the poor. Like the Parable of the broken window, there is a net loss to the poor and possibly the whole of a society to make recycling profitable.

Move to paper recycling

• When foresting companies cut down trees, more are planted in their place. Most paper comes from pulp forests grown specifically for paper production.

• Many environmentalists point out, however, that "farmed" forests are inferior to virgin forests in several ways. Farmed forests are less able to fix the soil as quickly as virgin forests, causing widespread soil erosion and often requiring large amounts of fertilizer to maintain while containing little tree and wild-life biodiversity compared to virgin forests.

To add

• Because the social support of a country is likely less than the loss of income to the poor doing recycling, there is a greater chance that the poor will come in conflict with the large recycling organizations[3].

• The amount of money actually saved through recycling is proportional to the efficiency of the recycling program used to do it. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance argues that the cost of recycling depends on various factors around a community that recycles, such as landfill fees and the amount of disposal that the community recycles. It states that communities start to save money when they treat recycling as a replacement for their traditional waste system rather than an add-on to it and by "redesigning their collection schedules and/or trucks."

External links

• Pittsburgh tribune article criticizing curbside recycling
• EPA municipal solid waste-recycling
• 2004 recycling episode of Penn & Teller's Showtime series [4]