2008 Woodie Awards
Recycled lies
Chris Conroy
Issue date: 2/20/07 Section: Opinion
In a recent column, Nandini Jammi expressed her outrage that students don't share her enthusiasm for the apparently elementary notion that recycling is an unquestionable positive for the environment and our community. While I share Jammi's disgust for litter, I must disagree with her implication that not recycling is just as bad as littering.
I don't doubt Jammi's commitment or concern for the environment, but the vast majority of recycling actually causes more problems than it solves. The elementary school justification for recycling often says it must be good for the environment because we are simply reusing materials instead of using up our precious natural resources. And, like most elementary school explanations, this reasoning doesn't stand up to real analytic scrutiny.
Recycling is not some magical zero-cost process - it involves a huge expenditure of economic and natural resources, and, like any other manufacturing process, recycling has its own waste and pollution streams. Most municipalities lose money on recycling because it is a lot cheaper to simply throw trash in a landfill than to have a separate truck pick up recyclables, have employees sort them in terrible working conditions and then expend all the energy necessary to get the recyclables back into a useful state. This is not to say all recycling is bad. In fact, aluminum recycling is a definite environmental and economic winner - it takes 95 percent less energy to recycle aluminum than to create it from bauxite.
Unfortunately, aluminum is the exception and not the rule. Jammi specifically mentions paper recycling, but its utility is questionable at best. The marginal energy savings from producing recycled paper are far offset from the substantial pollution and economic costs that it introduces. We aren't saving any trees by recycling paper - 87 percent of trees used to make paper were planted by paper companies for that purpose. We're also not facing a tree shortage in this country, because the number of trees in the U.S. has been steadily increasing for the past five decades. Recycling that glass bottle may make you feel good, but consumer recycling for the vast majority of materials requires more energy than simply tossing it away and making a new one. More energy use creates more pollution, and the very substantial economic inefficiencies of consumer recycling means we have that much less money to allocate to worthwhile community improvement projects.
Recycling advocates often hark back to the old landfill crisis myth that we must recycle, lest we be buried in our own waste. Of course, this argument is patently false and was created by a media-fueled hysteria over a single trash barge, the Mobro 4000, in 1987. Modern landfills are much more environmentally friendly than their recycling plant counterparts, and they take up such a minuscule portion of landmass that it's absolutely absurd this argument for recycling still abounds.
So, if recycling introduces significant economic overhead and causes more pollution than it prevents, then why, exactly, should we waste our precious time meticulously sorting our plastics and papers? I'm not sure why there's such big pressure, given the evidence in favor of sending our trash to the landfills.
We should all care about our community and our environment, but let's make informed decisions and not succumb to groupthink hysteria. Maybe future technologies will change the cost-benefit analysis of recycling, and in that case, I'd be all for it. But for now, tell all your Greenpeace friends to read Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, recycle your aluminum, and maybe we can divert our attention to actually doing something positive.
Chris Conroy is a junior computer science major. He can be reached at cconroy@gmail.com.
I don't doubt Jammi's commitment or concern for the environment, but the vast majority of recycling actually causes more problems than it solves. The elementary school justification for recycling often says it must be good for the environment because we are simply reusing materials instead of using up our precious natural resources. And, like most elementary school explanations, this reasoning doesn't stand up to real analytic scrutiny.
Recycling is not some magical zero-cost process - it involves a huge expenditure of economic and natural resources, and, like any other manufacturing process, recycling has its own waste and pollution streams. Most municipalities lose money on recycling because it is a lot cheaper to simply throw trash in a landfill than to have a separate truck pick up recyclables, have employees sort them in terrible working conditions and then expend all the energy necessary to get the recyclables back into a useful state. This is not to say all recycling is bad. In fact, aluminum recycling is a definite environmental and economic winner - it takes 95 percent less energy to recycle aluminum than to create it from bauxite.
Unfortunately, aluminum is the exception and not the rule. Jammi specifically mentions paper recycling, but its utility is questionable at best. The marginal energy savings from producing recycled paper are far offset from the substantial pollution and economic costs that it introduces. We aren't saving any trees by recycling paper - 87 percent of trees used to make paper were planted by paper companies for that purpose. We're also not facing a tree shortage in this country, because the number of trees in the U.S. has been steadily increasing for the past five decades. Recycling that glass bottle may make you feel good, but consumer recycling for the vast majority of materials requires more energy than simply tossing it away and making a new one. More energy use creates more pollution, and the very substantial economic inefficiencies of consumer recycling means we have that much less money to allocate to worthwhile community improvement projects.
Recycling advocates often hark back to the old landfill crisis myth that we must recycle, lest we be buried in our own waste. Of course, this argument is patently false and was created by a media-fueled hysteria over a single trash barge, the Mobro 4000, in 1987. Modern landfills are much more environmentally friendly than their recycling plant counterparts, and they take up such a minuscule portion of landmass that it's absolutely absurd this argument for recycling still abounds.
So, if recycling introduces significant economic overhead and causes more pollution than it prevents, then why, exactly, should we waste our precious time meticulously sorting our plastics and papers? I'm not sure why there's such big pressure, given the evidence in favor of sending our trash to the landfills.
We should all care about our community and our environment, but let's make informed decisions and not succumb to groupthink hysteria. Maybe future technologies will change the cost-benefit analysis of recycling, and in that case, I'd be all for it. But for now, tell all your Greenpeace friends to read Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, recycle your aluminum, and maybe we can divert our attention to actually doing something positive.
Chris Conroy is a junior computer science major. He can be reached at cconroy@gmail.com.
Submit a letter to the editor or post a comment below.
Viewing Comments 1 - 2 of 2
Anti-idiotarian
posted 2/20/07 @ 9:35 AM EST
Well, that was entirely sensible... now report to your nearest orthodox Leftist necromonger for immediate mind regression purification.
Jeff
posted 2/20/07 @ 12:52 PM EST
The most well known anti-recycling article was published in the New York Times, called "Recycling is Garbage". Look it up if you want more information on the viewpoint. (Continued…)
Post a Comment