Excerpts from Fort Freedom BBS, 914/941-1319 -- a pro-science, pro-technology, pro-free enterprise oasis. Call in, its free! THE IDIOCY OF COMPULSORY RECYCLING ---------------------------- [93.061] Recycling is one of the most successful of the recent scams perpetrated by environmentalists. It is a waste of time, money, and resources. Naturally, when anything this stupid presents itself, government, Federal, State and local, rushes to embrace the idea. Laws force people to wash and sort their garbage. Of all rubbish, that made of plastic enrages the eco-psychos most, since it is the thing most shaped by the hand of man. It is also the thing least worth recycling. "A study conducted for the National Solid Wastes Management Association, a trade group of private trash haulers, found the cost of processing in a recovery plant the range of materials left at curbside is $50 a ton, while the market value is $30. In a separate study, Waste Management Inc., the nations largest trash hauler, added in the costs of collection and put the total average cost at about $175 a ton and the average value of recovered materials at $40." "[P]lastic [accounts] for 30 percent of total collection and handling costs ... while constituting just 3 percent by weight of the material collected." "In 1990, Waste Management and DuPont announced, with great fanfare, a joint venture to recycle PET and HDPE bottles. But ... Waste Management ... discovered to its horror that it was costing as much as $1,500 a ton to collect and process plastics with a market value of $80 to $100 a ton. Waste Management dropped out of the venture in 1991 and Du Pont, last June." In the light of this, wise and honest Federal, State and local governments would admit than they had been dopes and repeal all recycling laws. Our governments, Federal and State, chose to make a bad situation worse. Sen. Max Baucus (D, Montana), head of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, wants to pass the cost of recycling onto the manufacturers and sellers; they would pay for the costs of disposal, not taxpayers. At the local-idiocy level, 165 state- levels bills banning or taxing the use plastics were introduced in 1992, though, fortunately, few were passed. There are no real problems in disposal of garbage. Any problems are politically and legally manufactured by government and the professional liars and shysters of the environmentalism industry. The best way to dispose of garbage depends on local circumstances: cities may chose incineration, rural municipalities may choose landfills. There are other ways, such as deep-ocean dumping, as well. In fact, the only garbage we can't seem to get rid of is the environmentalist and governmental garbage which is pushing us around. More Holusha, John. "Who Foots the Bill For Recycling?". The New York Times [Late Edition -- Final], 1993 Apr 25, Sec. 3, p. 5. Informative. Watch out for the green taint: there is an over reliance on information from environmentalists. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Trash That Recycling Plan By J. Winston Porter ["Mr. Porter is president of the Waste Policy Center in Sterling, Va. He served as EPA assistant administrator for solid and hazardous wastes from 1985 to 1989."] [From The Wall Street Journal [Eastern Edition], 1993 Jun 28, p. A16:3.] This summer, the chairman of the Senate Environmental Committee, Max Baucus (D., Mont.), plans to make good on a promise he made to the Conference of Mayors in April. It was there that he said he would press for bold new recycling legislation. Such a bill, modeled after a plan being tried in Germany, could require manufacturers to absorb the disposal costs of their product's packaging. But before Sen. Baucus gets too excited about foisting a version of this on American businesses and consumers, it would be wise to take a closer look: Germany's recycling system is rapidly unraveling. The company in charge of recycling Germany's trash, Duales System Deutschland (DSD), announced recently that it is $180 million to $300 million in the red, and the news has unleashed some harsh official criticism. "The `green dot' has run aground," was the judgment of one staffer on the Bundestag's environment committee, referring to the symbol on German packaging that signified it is recyclable through the DSD system. "Industry has bitten off more than it can chew." A state senator from Hamburg called the program "foolish," adding that in its present form the plan "leads to new environmental burdens." How Germany got to this point is an instructive tale for Sen. Baucus and the American recycling lobby. In 1991, bowing to heavy green pressure, Germany passed a law requiring its businesses to take back and recycle all forms of packaging -- bottles, cans, containers, cartons and sacks. Such packaging amounts to about one-third of Germany's municipal trash. To prove it meant business, the government set ambitious recycling rates: By 1995, 72% of all German glass, steel and aluminum packaging is to be recycled; for paper, paperboard, plastics and composites, the target is a slightly more modest 64%. Retailers quickly lobbied for and won an amendment exempting them from accepting wastes at their stores -- leaving it to the manufacturers and distributors alone to guarantee (and pay for) the collecting and recycling of all packaging wastes. Left holding the bag, some 600 producers responded by creating the DSD, a nonprofit company, to collect and sort the stuff. Until now the DSD has funded itself through a system of license fees on each type of packaging material. Upon payment of the fee, a producer is entitled to place a "green dot" on its packaging, which tells consumers that recycling is "guaranteed." DSD's fees are currently based on volume, but this approach has not proved cost-effective. Beginning this October, DSD aims to cover expenses by charging member companies license fees that more closely reflect its costs for collecting and separating trash: 4.5 cents per pound of glass packaging; 9.5 cents for paper; 16 cents for steel; 28.5 cents for aluminum; 47 cents for composites; and 74 cents for plastics. Most of these fees, it should be noted, greatly exceed the market value of the recycled material. DSD's revenues from these fees are expected to range from $60 million a year for aluminum to $1.3 billion for plastics. The company expects to take in $2.5 billion in 1994. But whether this will be enough to keep the system going seems less and less certain. DSD services 96% of German households. In many areas, consumers must bring their glass bottles and sometimes paper to community drop-off points. At a growing number of residences and commercial establishments, a blue of green bin is provided for paper packaging, and a yellow bin for all other packaging. In other words, the contents of the yellow bins look a lot like, well, regular trash. The melange must first go to one of about 200 sorting centers where steel is pulled out magnetically, and the rest is separated by hand -- a slow and costly process. While the extraordinary expense of Germany's system is clear, the real environmental benefit -- except perhaps for a modest reduction in packaging to lower recycling costs -- is not. This is especially true when it comes to plastic, a very large component of the German packaging market. "The Achilles' heel of the Duales System is made of plastic," wrote Wolfgang Roth in the Suddeutsche Zeitung. "The question that is becoming increasingly obvious is: Is intensive reprocessing in this sector even desirable on ecological grounds?" In Sweden, Switzerland, France, and parts of the U.S. and other countries, trash, including plastic, is safely incinerated to make heat or electricity -- arguably a form of recycling. Incidentally, plastics are certainly a cleaner fuel than coal, one of Germany's major energy sources. Germany's recycling costs per ton range from about $100 for glass to more than $2,000 for plastics. Overall cost is about $500 per ton for all German recyclables. In the U.S., by comparison, trash is collected and sent to landfills or waster-to-energy incinerators for costs of about $75 to $150 per ton; per-ton collection and sorting costs for recyclables are about $150 to $250. And Americans recycle some 22% of their trash -- which compares favorably with Germans, whose high recycling rates apply only to packaging wastes. The overall German recycling rate appears also to be in the low 20% range. In today's Germany, "recycling at any cost" has overwhelmed common sense and economics, with international repercussions. The main flaw of the German "green dot" system is that it goes way overboard in collecting all types of packaging at rigidly mandated rates. This introduces enormous market inefficiencies: Huge costs are being incurred for separating a lot of packaging that has almost no market value. And a dearth of domestic buyers has led to the dumping of cheap German recyclables on foreign markets -- depressing prices in neighboring countries. In 1988, as an assistant administrator with the Environmental Protection Agency, I set a national goal in the U.S. of a 25% recycling rate. Some state legislatures have set their own targets that average about 30%. But these are mostly aimed at the total waste stream, not at specific components. In the U.S. the free market has been allowed to work, so those items with the most value and least cost to collect and reprocess tend to be the ones recycled: Today half of all recycling tonnage in the U.S. is composed of corrugated boxes and newspapers. Most of the rest is made up of a few types of cans and bottles. In the brave new world of environmental correctness it is time to subject green ideologies to serious number crunching regarding real economic and environmental impact. We can start with debunking the idea that Germany's floundering recycling system would work here. [The following is not part of the original article.] Recycling of some materials, for example, aluminum and paper, is worthwhile in a free market. The problem with compulsory recycling laws is that politicians and bureaucrats, not free individuals, decide how much of a particular item to recycle. The result is usually a permanently glutted market. State intervention destroys the market for the material. In order to sustain a sham-market, the state must intervene more and more, with such compulsory measures as recycled- content laws, taxes and fees on virgin materials, and whatever else lawyerish minds can conceive. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dumping: Less Wasteful Than Recycling By Clark Wiseman [``Mr. Wiseman, a professor of economics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash. is a visiting fellow at Resources for the Future, in Washington, D.C.''] [From The Wall Street Journal, 1991 Jul 18, p. A10:3.] [927 words] The proposal by the hard-pressed government of New York City to suspend its recycling program for a year is a direct result of the high cost of recycling. At around $300 per ton, the cost has proven to be well in excess of the $65 per ton figure that was originally estimated. True, the program has been plagued by labor problems and a low level of citizen participation, but it is wishful thinking to believe that either more cooperation from sanitation unions or the achievement of greater civic support and a higher recycling rate will bring the costs of recycling down to an acceptable level. Curbside recycling programs across the U.S. typically cost far more than landfilling, frequently twice as much, even when sales revenues and avoided waste disposal costs are included in the calculation. On a strictly economic basis, large-scale recycling is simply wasteful, leaving taxpayers and end users of solid waste disposal services paying a larger bill. The frenzied national push for recycling is largely the result of grossly mistaken beliefs about landfilling and the magnitude of the disposal problem, together with a seriously flawed decision- making process in the siting of landfills. What most people don't know about landfills could fill a landfill. At the current rate, if all the nation's solid waste for the next 500 years were piled or buried in a single landfill to a depth of 100 yards -- about half the eventual height of Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill -- this ``national landfill'' would require a square site less than 20 miles on a side. With compaction, even this volume could be halved. Most people also don't know that the amount of solid waste generated nationally has grown at only a 2% average rate over the past 30 years, considerably less than the growth of the GNP. This means that our ``throw away society'' is actually throwing out a progressively smaller share of its output. There are indications that this rate of growth is declining as the economy becomes more service-oriented. The view is widely held that landfilling should be minimized because of the great environmental risks. But landfills are constantly becoming less obnoxious. New federal and state performance standards are comprehensive and stringent, with environmental considerations entering into all relevant aspects of landfill construction and operation, including location; fencing; groundwater and gas monitoring and control; frequency of earth covering for rodent, bird, and odor control; closure; and post-closure gas and groundwater monitoring. Many landfills designed and operated with this degree of environmental control already exist; some have already filled and closed, and the land has been converted to other (often recreational) uses. If our landfills are to be environmental Cadillacs, the issue then becomes one of sticker price. As might be expected, this will vary according to differences in land prices. A new landfill can cost up to five times as much as a standard 1975 landfill. Even so, landfill costs account for only about 25 cents of the cost of disposing of the garbage in a standard 32-gallon can. The remainder of what one pays is the relatively high cost of collection, hauling and perhaps hidden and explicit taxes. Even where land is expensive it is seldom more than a small fraction of the landfilling portion of waste disposal charges. Even with the sky-high land prices and the long hauls that are necessary in most metropolitan areas, landfilling is a bargain. The solid waste problem is not one of space, ecology or even cost. The problem is a political one -- that of siting new landfills. Anticipating the loss of amenities or property values, potentially affected property owners unite into a group capable of bending government to its will. The special interest nature of the resulting policies is not different in nature from farm subsidies, protective tariffs and unnecessary military instillations, all of which confer losses upon citizens at large. The landfill siting problem is directly related to population densities. In some of the more sparsely populated areas of the Western states there are virtually no siting difficulties. By contrast, in the East, permitting new landfills is political suicide. Fortunately, a decision-making procedure is available that helps the creation of new landfills, while still preserving control over the environmental consequences of landfills. The state of Wisconsin has since 1982 legally required municipal and county governments to establish local negotiating committees in response to applications for the creation of a landfill by a private landowner. The committees, which must include a prescribed number of private citizens as well as elected officials, are empowered to negotiate the financial and other contractual relations between the landfill owner and local governments. Environmental and technical matters are not negotiable but are handled by a separate process at the state level. Although -- or perhaps because -- failure to reach an agreement can result in outside mediation and possibly arbitration by a state agency, agreements have been negotiated by committee in almost all cases. The workability of a system along these lines results from the explicit recognition of a prescribed set of rules. Although such rules constrain their powers, local elected officials do not complain, since their longevity in office can only be enhanced by the inability to make ``unpopular'' decisions. The choking off of a viable alternative like low cost and environmentally sound landfills is wasteful of society's resources. Before continuing to run headlong toward politically popular but costlier alternatives -- including recycling -- it would be wise to give increased attention to the real cause of the so-called solid waste ``crisis.'' [The following is not part of the original article.] In places of the country where land is expensive, garbage incinerators are a practical alternative to dumping. The City of New York spent most of the decade of 1980 trying to build garbage incinerators but its efforts came to naught. The City's tale is instructive: June 1980: the New York State Senate approved a bill allowing New York City to Build a solid-waste recovery plant at the site of the old Brooklyn Navy Yard. By 1982: the plan for a recovery plant is replaced by a plan for an incinerator. December 1984: the New York City Board of Estimate approves a resolution calling on the Sanitation Department to proceed immediately with plans for incinerators in five boroughs. The plants are to begin operating in 1991. August 1985: the Board of Estimate gives final approval for construction of a garbage-burning incinerator at the old Brooklyn Navy Yard. September 1985 to April 1989: The Naderite NYPIRG (Public Interest Research Group) begins its campaign of suits, lobbying, and disinformation. June 1989: NYPIRG, EDF, NRDC, the Interstate Sanitary Commission and the United Jewish Organization (representing Jews in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn where the incinerator would be located) file suit to bar construction of the incinerator. January 1990: David Dinkins, who as candidate pledged a two-to-three year moratorium on the incinerator, is elected mayor of New York City. More Reading Hang, Walter Liong-Ting. A Citizen Guide to Anti-incinerator Pro-recycling Campaigns. New York: NYPIRG, 1987. The Naderites are masters of using the media and the judicial system to block progress. Here's how to do it straight from the horse's mouth. Inhaber, Herbert. ``Resolving the NIMBY Problem'', Cato Policy Report 13(3):8-9 (1991). Inhaber suggests that a ``reverse Dutch auction'' is the solution NIMBY. Offer a bonus to the community which accepts the facilities no one wants. If no community in the U.S. accepts, keep raising the bonus. Communities vote on whether to accept the facilities, following regular democratic procedures. Osterberg, Charles. ``Deep Ocean: The Safest Dump'' [Op-Ed], The New York Times, 1989 Jun 14, I, p. 27:2.] Postrel, Virgina I. and Scarlett, Lynn. ``Talking Trash'', Reason 23(4):22-31 (1991 Aug/Sep). Rathje, William L. and Ritenbaugh, Cheryl K., Eds. American Behavioral Scientist 28(1) (1984 Sep/Oct). Special issue devoted to ``Household Refuse Analysis: Theory, Method, and Applications in Social Science''. Rathje, William L. ``Rubbish!'', The Atlantic, 1989 Dec, pp. 99-106, 108-109. Scarlett, Lynn. ``Dirty the Environment by Recycling'', The Wall Street Journal, 1991 Jan 14, p. A12:3. Simon, Julian L. ``Dump on Us, Baby, We Need It'' in Julian L. Simon, Population Matters (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990), pp. 458-460. This piece originally appeared as ``Humanity Doesn't Waste the Benefits Found in Trash'', Chicago Tribune, 27 Feb 1990, p. 11.