Recycling is Not Sustainable

John Tierney writes,

Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies. . . .

Moreover, recycling operations have their own environmental costs, like extra trucks on the road and pollution from recycling operations. Composting facilities around the country have inspired complaints about nauseating odors, swarming rats and defecating sea gulls. After New York City started sending food waste to be composted in Delaware, the unhappy neighbors of the composting plant successfully campaigned to shut it down last year.

Belongs on first-year economics course reading lists everywhere.

7 thoughts on “Recycling is Not Sustainable

  1. Seems to me that what’s most relevant for the consumer is the marginal benefit of recycling. Once your municipality has already set up recycling infrastructure does it make sense to participate?

  2. “Belongs on first-year economics course reading lists everywhere.”

    This is so not an issue of economics. Read the comments section from Tierney’s recent article. The people commenting there are not making rational arguments they are screaming “blasphemy!” For the left Greenism is what has replaced religion.

  3. Somebody really thought shipping food scraps half way across New Jersey was a good use of scarce resources. Kinda says it all.

  4. Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill.

    Wouldn’t the prices of landfill increase?

  5. Nothing is sustainable as is, but must continually adapt, and no part of a whole is sustainable or not without consideration of the whole.

  6. The “Poor” are always with us.

    Those who “know better” are always with us.

    Those who know “best” are always ahead of us.

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