
The Reign of Recycling - henrik_w
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-of-recycling.html
======
Steltek
Not a topic I've really researched but even the article appears very
misleading or biased.

There's the assumption that my regular trash goes to a landfill (it does not)
and even if it did, maybe my goal is not to save money but to have fewer
stupid landfills. I'm not really interested in how much open space is
available to pile up trash, I just plain don't want it to pile up.

It then makes some odd argument about offsetting the carbon of airplane travel
when I'm really just concerned about the carbon embodied in the plastic
bottle.

Complaints about the annoyance of composting facilities seems plenty absurd
just after talking about the abundance of open space to dump trash.

There's other bits and pieces strewn about the article but the whole thing
reaks of "Nirvana Fallacy": the current solution isn't good enough so let's
sit on our hands until we think of a better one.

~~~
logn
The point was that landfills and incinerators work pretty well and that
there's no rational justification to eliminate them. And landfills needed for
1000 years of USA's trash would take up about .1% of our grazing land.

Just because people might not like the concept of piling up trash doesn't mean
it's an inherently bad idea.

Overall waste and recycling is low on the threats to our planet so I think
doing nothing is ok (if by doing nothing you mean incinerating trash to
generate electricity or responsibly burying it). The primary issue is reducing
meat/dairy consumption and the next is transportation.

~~~
gioele
> The point was that landfills and incinerators work pretty well and that
> there's no rational justification to eliminate them.

Incinerators have well known carcinogenic effects.

Landfills can easily pollute the nearby fields and water aquifers. And in most
of Europe and Japan there is no more space for them.

~~~
CapTVK
Are we talking about classic incinerators (simply burn stuff) or plasma arc
(gasification)incinerators? With plasma arc gasifications the temperatures are
so high (2,200 to 13,900 °C) that all the waste and any resulting toxic
byproducts, the very molecules themselves, are broken down to individual
atoms. There are no toxic compounds left.

All that remains at the end is ash that contains various metals and syngas
that is produced in the process. Which can be used for generating electric
power.

I hope plasma arc gasification becomes the standard for managing and disposing
municipal solid waste. It really works. But you do need a certain scale
(enough waste) for it to be effective.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification)

[http://www.waste-management-
world.com/articles/print/volume-...](http://www.waste-management-
world.com/articles/print/volume-11/issue-6/features/plasma-arc-the-leading-
light.html)

~~~
gioele
> Are we talking about classic incinerators (simply burn stuff) or plasma arc
> (gasification)incinerators?

In 2015 "incinerator" means classic burners. Plasma gasification is
practically unused: there are less that 10 plasma gasification facilities in
the world.

------
ZeroGravitas
Lots of contradictions in this short screed.

Apparently fining people for putting their trash in the recycling is bad, but
charging them for landfill waste is good. What will stop these people from
trying to save money by putting it in the recycling instead? Fines perhaps?

Landfills are good because they give off methane, but recycling food and yard
waste is bad. Yet isn't it exactly those parts of the waste stream that
decompose to methane and can be captured directly?

Recycling trucks use too much fuel but locating landfills out in the country
is sensible.

The recycling industry is just make work for special interests, yet we should
stop recycling paper so that we can keep tree loggers in jobs.

------
xorcist
This mostly qualifies as "not even wrong" material.

Recycling may or may not be broken in New York or the US at large, but it's
quite a no-brainer that you should not try to incinerate aluminum cans just to
waste resources making new material. (Or paper. Or glass.)

With language like "indoctrination" there's no way to take this seriously.
(Don't get me started on countries still using landfills. There's just no
excuse for a modern society. The cost model won't make sense at all unless you
do something with your trash.)

The examples in the article is also cringeworthy. "To offset the greenhouse
production of a plane trip you have to recycle x cans" (where x is large). On
the surface that tells us plane trips are very dirty, greenhouse-wise. Yet
somehow the spin is how inefficient recycling is. But the greenhouse effect is
not the main reason to recycle (also aluminum production is heavy on using
renewables)!

~~~
crazy1van
> But the greenhouse effect is not the main reason to recycle

What is the main reason to recycle? I always assumed it was either for
greenhouse reasons and/or landfill space reasons, but I might not really
understand the goals.

If a goal is less greenhouse emissions, then I think the point of the water
bottle / plane trip example is that at a macro level, there are much better
ways to reduce greenhouse emissions. Refraining from a single plane trip
reduces more emissions than a lifetime of bottle recycling. It seems akin to
stating your goal is to save money, which leads you to spend a few hours
recovering a handful of coins from your couch and then buying a new car. Yes,
the coins you recovered did get you more money, but relative to your other
action -- the new car -- it is insignificant.

~~~
xorcist
> What is the main reason to recycle?

It saves resources. But it's also economically efficient, which is the main
reason societies do it.

Landfills are completely dysfunctional in every way. Worst case, burn it and
make use of the energy. The ashes are then much easier to take care of than
what's seeping out of landfills.

> Refraining from a single plane trip reduces more emissions than a lifetime
> of bottle recycling.

Even if that was the goal, nobody ever said "Shall I take a plane trip today?
No, I think I will recycle plastic bottles instead!". It's completely
orthogonal.

I like the parable about how saving a handful of coins is insignificant to
buying a new car. In practice you pick up the dropped the coins from your
couch, independent if you plan to buy that car or not.

It works both ways. To frame the problem the way as in the article, no one
pours spare coins out the window because you just decided not to buy a new car
next week.

~~~
crazy1van
> It saves resources. But it's also economically efficient, which is the main
> reason societies do it.

I don't really think I agree that economic reasons are the only reasons to
recycle. Some things like green house gas emissions are economic externalities
that we should take into account even though they don't directly affect the
economic bottom line.

From that logic if recycling was ever proven to not be economically efficient,
then we should stop doing it. I think the article was basically saying that in
many ways it isn't economically efficient.

> Landfills are completely dysfunctional in every way.

Not sure if I agree with that. In the USA, we have a lot of extra space. After
a certain number of years, the landfill can be covered and the land itself
reused. Seems just like another form of recycling.

------
mliq
A completely neglected key factor is that it costs much less energy to
manufacture recycled materials than virgin materials.

'A study ... found that it takes 10.4 million Btu to manufacture products from
a ton of recyclables, compared to 23.3 million Btu for virgin materials. In
contrast, the total energy for collecting, hauling and processing a ton of
recyclables adds up to just 0.9 million Btu. The bottom line: We don't need to
worry that recycling trucks are doing more harm than good.' \-
[http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a3736/42...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a3736/4290631/)

------
dankohn1
Tierney's original 1996 article had a huge impact on me when it came out, and
I still get in arguments with my wife today when I don't recycle.

It seems obvious to me that the right answer to waste is to apply a Pigovian
tax
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax)
, which is what Tierney is suggesting with the $15 tax per ton of landfill
waste. Then, materials that can be profitably separated (currently, paper,
aluminum, and cardboard) would be exempted from the fee if you separate them.

The great problem I have with current recycling is that it is not based on any
realistic theory of monetizing externalities.

~~~
specialist
Pigovian tax?

Tierney writes:

 _It would be much simpler and more effective to impose the equivalent of a
carbon tax on garbage, as Thomas C. Kinnaman has proposed_

I already pay to have someone haul away my garbage, yard waste, recycling.

How is what you, Tierney, and Kinnaman propose different?

[Kinnaman's paper is paywalled.]

~~~
dankohn1
In New York City, it is against the law not to recycle. Paying for garbage
removal (via taxes, or preferably, a per bag fee), but not for (realistically)
recyclable trash removal, would be a good start.

------
legulere
> Moreover, recycling operations have their own environmental costs, like
> extra trucks on the road and pollution from recycling operations.

Opposed to trucks driving to "rural communities"

~~~
radley
Yeah, he's making a nitwit statement there. Recycling or landfill - it's the
same quantity of mass that has to be hauled somewhere.

~~~
ars
That's not in the slightest true. Recycling stations are very high tech, and
very expensive. There are not many of them.

So you have to ship your recycling much much farther than your garbage.

~~~
RobertKerans
As opposed to [for example] mining/milling/refinement/etc operations, which
are also generally highly centralised?

------
xivzgrev
It's hard to take this article seriously - heavy on broad stroke attacks (it's
cheaper to send to landfill) than data from third party sources.

On an unrelated note if a composting facility reeks that's a management
problem not a fundamental issue of composting - that means there is too much
"green" waste such as food scraps relative to "brown" waste such as soiled
paper.

~~~
Zelmor
It is also worth noting how the author doesn't mind the landfills as long as
they are in rural countryside. You know, where I grow my food and raise
animals for their meat, not him.

------
ScottBurson
Although I've been a dedicated recycler for years, I'm glad to read this. It
confirms an impression I had already received from various other sources, that
the primary value is separating out metals (especially aluminum) and paper --
actually I didn't know that recycling paper made such a big difference -- and
plastics are secondary.

Is it worth rinsing plastic to recycle it? I've wondered about this. Sounds
like it probably isn't unless it takes only a small amount of rinsing.

~~~
akjj
> the primary value is separating out metals (especially aluminum) and paper

Especially cardboard. Cardboard is significantly more valuable than other
types of paper.

> Is it worth rinsing plastic to recycle it? I've wondered about this. Sounds
> like it probably isn't unless it takes only a small amount of rinsing.

The article argues that it isn't if you rinse in hot water, which was heated
by electricity (not gas), which came from a coal power plant. That seems like
a comparison which is set up to make recycling look bad. I've never had any
problems just rinsing plastic with cold water or leftover dish water, in which
case it sounds like it's still worth it.

------
JesperRavn
I really liked this article. Even though we don't have access to the most
relevant information (e.g. dollars per ton CO2 saved, or a cost benefit
analysis using a shadow price of CO2), the author presents a lot of very
compelling figures to show that recycling is overrated.

For example, given the overwhelming concentration of the benefits of recycling
in paper and metal (as opposed to plastic and bottles), surely collections
efforts and public education should be focussed on these.

And the author is exactly right to refer to "indoctrination" regarding
recycling. At least that was my experience in primary school and high school.

I think the most important problem with the Green movement is not special
interests per se (I doubt recyclers really that powerful) but the mindset that
says that changing other people's opinion is more important than presenting
them with the most accurate information.

