The Dubious Value of Recycling

Writing some time ago in an article on Sweden's Skeptical Environmentalist and his campaign against indiscriminate recycling, Waldemar Ingdahl wrote:

technological improvements have made incineration cleaner and the process could be used to generate electricity, cutting dependency on oil. They rejected collecting household cartons as very unprofitable and time-consuming. Used bottles and glass cost glass companies twice as much as the raw materials, and recycling plastics was uneconomical, they said. 'Plastics are made from oil and can quite simply be incinerated,' they argued. Glass mixed with household waste improved the quality of slag residue and could be used for landfill. Tin cans could be removed by magnets and sent for recycling. They stressed, though, that the collection of dangerous waste, such as batteries, electrical appliances, medicines, paint and chemicals, must be further improved. Their final point was the controversial conclusion that protection of the environment can mean economic sacrifices, but to maintain the credibility of environmental politics the gains must be worth the sacrifice.

More recently, Rob Lyons wonders:

But the question is whether recycling actually makes economic and social sense at the moment. Is it appropriate to devote more of society's energy to recycling waste on this proposed scale?

It is still cheaper in the UK to landfill or incinerate most waste, despite the levying of a landfill tax to skew the market in favour of other forms of disposal. Apart from the south east of England, there seems to be little difficulty in finding land suitable for landfill. And even with recycling, landfill will still be required for the residue....

It seems that recycling household waste is a costly distraction from more useful social priorities, and will actually make little difference to the amount of waste we produce. So why the obsession with promoting it in the UK?

The discussion about recycling has far more to do with a moral message than with economics. In the absence of any widespread belief in God, Queen or Country, the need to 'save the planet' is one of the few certainties that society has left. If we accept that human beings are wasteful and polluting, as we are clearly supposed to, then who could disagree with the notion that we should all do our bit to undo the damage we do? Recycling is a physically tangible way that individuals can express this outlook. By separating out our waste paper, cans and bottles, we offer some kind of penance for our sinful consumption (and, better still, be seen to do so).

The real aim of recycling schemes is change individuals' relationship to the rest of society. The government wants to create active, responsible citizens - in other words, people who take their lead in their everyday lives from the edicts of the authorities. Caring for the environment fits into a wider pattern of apparently non-political activities through which the government attempts in one way or another to get us to accept its authority.

He makes some good points about the inefficiency of recycling, and I'm certain that many people feel they're being virtuous, but I don't think it's really a plot by the government to make us accept their authority, even if they certainly think that's a good thing.

Indeed, Saint Cecil wrote:

Do most recycling programs lose money? Of course. So does plain old garbage collection. The question is whether disposal programs involving recycling are more expensive than the old-fashioned variety. Answer: at the outset, yes. After a few years, however, many municipalities find that recycling saves money. Some don't, and eventually those folks may want to reconsider the wisdom of their recycling program. The fact remains that recycling in response to an arbitrary government fiat is a useful exercise. Municipal waste disposal historically has been considered an unavoidable expense, with little thought given to whether it could be done more cheaply. Mandatory recycling compels you to give it that little bit of thought: do we really need to throw all this junk away?

I pretty much lost respect for him there.

Julian Morris stated the economic argument with great clarity when he wrote wrote:

Markets minimise waste

The fundamental objective of any business enterprise is to create added value - to sell goods at a price greater than the costs of production. So the entrepreneur is always vigilant for ways of improving product performance and reducing costs. Cost reductions can be made in numerous ways, including by reducing the use of raw materials and from using residuals more efficiently....

The notion that this system can be improved upon by government intervention - as many argue - is implausible. The government's (or regulator's) knowledge of what use of resources is most efficient is likely in most cases to be less complete than that of the individual manufacturers, who must day after day assess the costs of inputs and prices of outputs.