

The Recycling Myth - maxwell
http://mises.org/story/2855

======
xcombinator
Typical american mindset: Everything is money. Use something, throwaway when
don't needed, bury it, contaminate the soil, the seas, it's cheaper.

Of course they are external cost to recycle, what he doesn't say is that THEY
ARE EXTERNAL COST TO NOT RECYCLING. Nature knows that since long long ago, she
recycles everything.

The Pacific is filled with polymers just because people love to use plastics
and don't recycle them, fishes dye (external cost) every day because they
confuse it with jellyfish. Jellyfish plague the seas(external cost).

Plastics additives are getting to our food chain(external cost). Our water
contaminated by flame retardants and biphenols A when you bury it are
affecting us (external cost).

If you want to make new paper you need to contaminate the rivers (Think about
International Paper corp.). Making aluminium from oxide, instead of melting
takes an exorbitant quantity of energy(external cost).

This article is pure demagogy, if he want to be serious he needs to put
numbers over the table.

~~~
jacquesm
Fishes dye ? You mean they change colour because they ingest polymers ? Or you
mean they die ?

My money is on the 'expiry' :)

Anyway, you make excellent points, and the article is spouting typical
industry grade bs.

Resources are finite.

A guy called 'Eckart Wintzen' promoted a concept he called 'taxing resources
removed', which essentially is the opposite of 'value added tax'. His idea was
that you should pay taxes on those resources that you remove from the
biosphere, and that products made from recycled goods ought to be tax free.

I think it was an excellent concept.

~~~
felipe
Eckart Wintzen is my hero since I worked at his company, Origin, back in the
90s. He actually implemented that concept at Origin: We had to track and
estimate the footprint of each project, and then the amount was reinvested in
environmental projects.

Recently I have created a methodology inspired by that experience at Origin:
[http://www.scribd.com/doc/5507536/Sustainable-Software-
Engin...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/5507536/Sustainable-Software-Engineering)

More info about Eckart Wintzen (who passed away recently):
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.11/es_wintzen_pr.html>

~~~
jacquesm
And here: <http://extent.nl/>

'Eck's tent' :)

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theschwa
The title really should be "The Myth of Forced Recycling"

I guarantee you there are efficient and even profitable ways to recycle, but
those not only don't require the use of force but will be made less efficient
by its presence.

That being said... Why is this on HN? I would prefer to keep more political
topics off of here. Mises.org has some really good technology and Intellectual
Property right related articles, but people might be inclined to ignore the
source if they're already inclined to believe that it will be off topic.

~~~
proemeth
This is more economic than politic. The government creates an incentive to
sort garbage, which should lead to new businesses creation and better overall
management of garbage/recycling.

The article suggests that people have to sort their garbage themselves, but
they could pay someone to do it for them. This is similar to carbon taxes
philosophy, create an incentive by making consumers bear the cost of
inefficiencies, then some company will find a way to improve things, this
reducing those costs.

~~~
marknutter
> The government creates an incentive to sort garbage, which should lead to
> new businesses creation and better overall management of garbage/recycling.

Either way, citizens will be forced to pay these new businesses to do this
task, and most will probably still continue to do it themselves to save money.
This recycling program is basically a massive tax on the populace, hidden
under the guise of environmentalism. Not to mention it's probably much more
difficult to start a business in Sweden than here in the states. I would
imagine the Swedish government would take issue with companies profiting off
of government programs. That, or there's some other red-tape involved,
otherwise we'd already see these garbage sorting companies in existence (it's
the first thing I thought of too when I was reading the article).

~~~
henrikschroder
The article is of course exaggerating, noone is forced to do extensive garbage
sorting, so paying someone to do it makes absolutely no sense. A lot of people
do it because they feel compelled to do "the right thing", others do some sort
of best effort, and some ignore it completely.

------
soundsop
The basic premise is that (in Sweden) the uncounted cost of cleaning and
sorting waste and driving to dispose of it is greater than the savings due to
recycling. It would have been nice to see at least an order-of-magnitude
calculation estimating the uncounted cost. If the cost is so obviously greater
than the savings of recycling, then a simple estimation should be sufficient.

The author is probably right, but some concrete numbers would go a long way to
supporting his argument.

~~~
jacquesm
Why is he 'probably right' without proof ?

I remember when I was a kid that factories were paying for old paper and old
glass. A whole generation made their pocket money that way. If it was worth
something back then I would expect it to be worth something today.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I don't know if he is right. But I doubt that a completely manual sorting and
cleaning process is the most efficient we can do. Sorting and cleaning waste
industrially, using the right tools for the job, has to be better.

Also, there are numerous studies showing how much more efficient public
transport is compared to people using their own cars. Now they make people
drive waste bags around in their own cars. That has got to be a very bad idea.

------
wisty
There's an easy solution. Put a deposit (tax) on bottles, that gets refunded
when the bottle gets recycled.

If it's worth a 10 cent "sin tax" for me to chuck a Cola bottle away, the
that's my choice. If somebody can sort my garbage (because they really need
the money, or they have a high-tech robot that can sort trash really well, or
whatever else), then they win as well.

~~~
parboman
this is already done in Sweden.

~~~
yagiz
And in Turkey, for some bottles.

------
m_eiman
I don't know which part of Sweden the author lives in, but it's apparently not
my part. In our trash room here we have bins for glass (white/coloured),
paper, batteries and garbage. Card board boxes and other "big" stuff
(basically anything that isn't normal consumables) is left at the recycling
station (and assuming you do that on your way to work and don't go once per
item, the extra energy needed is next to nothing).

I'd say that he's trying very hard to make a point, and exaggerates.

~~~
henrikschroder
I also live in Sweden, and in all the places I've lived, recycling has always
been optional. If you don't want to recycle anything, you can just throw
everything in the general trash, and noone will know or complain or charge you
extra for it.

That said, I read an article many years ago by the head of our environmental
protection agency, and he rightfully pointed out the externalizing of the cost
of sorting on the population, but most importantly he pointed out that
recycling of some materials is completely negative, i.e. it is cheaper and
uses less energy to create fresh material than recycle the old.

The materials that _did_ make sense to recycle though was glass, newspaper and
aluminium cans. By not recycling milk cartons or plastic containers, you're
doing more for the environment than if you recycle them.

The lesson learned is of course that you should always have science to back up
your viewpoint, only by making a lifecycle analysis can you find out if a
certain activity really is good for the environment, or if it's only good for
your conscience.

~~~
marknutter
I've never understood why we recycle glass. It doesn't seem like the materials
to make glass are in short supply. Is it just much more costly to gather them
new than to melt down existing glass containers?

~~~
winthrowe
At least in some areas, the glass can be plainly reused, instead of going
through a full recycling process. In Canada, the brown glass beer bottles can
be washed and refilled over a dozen times before failing quality checks and
needing to be ground and remelted.

~~~
marknutter
So that's why Canadian beer tastes so terrible :-p

------
barrkel
> _The structure works the way all centrally planned structures work: it
> increases and centralizes power while the attempted (expected) results do
> not materialize_

I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous
biases right up front. Central planning has never achieved an expected result?
There was never a successful corporation? Nor a military operation? Really?

If you're going to be an ideological shill, at least try to hide it a bit
better.

~~~
gaius
Errm, actually (modern) militaries are highly decentralized. The corporal on
the ground has a great deal of latitude and is expected to show initiative and
creativity.

Contrast that with the highly centralized militaries of WW1 - the attempted
result wasn't "get bogged down for 4 years while our troops are mass-
slaughtered".

~~~
barrkel
I think you've missed my point. The article writer made a ridiculously strong
claim: that _no_ centralized structure _ever_ worked. Only a single
counterexample is needed to show that this is a dodgy claim, but
counterexamples to this aren't rare, they're abundant. In particular, any time
the efficiency costs of centralization are less than the transaction costs of
decentralized parts cooperating, centralization is a win. There's a reason
we've evolved brains.

Coming up with examples where decentralization beat centralization, on the
other hand, proves nothing.

------
dublinclontarf
What is being described here is how the Swedish government is externalising
costs. Of coarse it looks good, and profitable on paper because most of the
costs (and environmental effects) have been put onto the population.

As the article mentions this is bad for the environment.

~~~
nostrademons
So, there was basically a glaring hole in the logic of the article, and I was
wondering if there's anyone else here that can answer it for me....

Garbage is _already_ a big externality. A positive one. The government takes
care of hauling away your trash and disposing of it, somewhere, and you get to
benefit from the economies of scale of centralizing this.

The truly individualist, libertarian thing to do with your garbage is not to
leave it on the curb for the government to pick up. It's to bury it in your
backyard.

What's that you say? "Not in my back yard"?

I had a couple actual questions buried in the snark. Is it still legal to bury
trash in your own back yard, on your own property, assuming you take the
necessary precautions to prevent it from seeping into groundwater? And if so,
would you - or the article's author - do so?

And if someone wanted to start a garbage collection corporation, using land
_they_ own, that _they've_ lined so it doesn't leech into groundwater, and
hauling away garbage with _their own_ trucks, would the government stop them?
I don't think so, but I dunno if it's ever been tried. I think that they'd
quickly find out that skipping every other house on the block because they
aren't a customer isn't very cost-effective, instead.

I don't think it's necessarily wrong to externalize costs back onto the
population if they initially came from the population. It's like complaining
about the free food your employer gives you, when there's nothing stopping you
from getting your own food elsewhere. (I admit that I've been guilty of that
on occasion, but at least I don't write articles - _from a
libertarian/anarchist POV_ \- about how the government _owes_ me convenient
garbage disposal.)

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
* I think that they'd quickly find out that skipping every other house on the block because they aren't a customer isn't very cost-effective, instead.*

I don't understand why. This is exactly how trash pickup in my area works:
there are multiple companies and they only pickup for their own customers. To
add insult to injury, I live in a very low-density rural county. Since these
guys have been in business for years, I have to assume they're profitable!

