For recycling to be a socially commendable activity, it has to pass one of two tests: the profit test, or the net environmental-savings test. If something passes the profit test, it’s likely already being done.
[for the environmental-savings test] it must cost less to dispose of recycled material than to put the stuff in a landfill.
He argues that recycling aluminum cans passes the environmental’savings test, but recycling glass (and many other things) does not.
Finally,
The real problem, as I see it, is that the recycling industry is selling indulgences, giving people the moral license to pollute because “Hey, I recycle!” To the extent that a lot of recycling is harmful to the environment, this is a double whammy: recycling is largely fake, but it enables people to feel okay about doing other things that pollute.
Pointer from Don Boudreaux.
MSN reported back in 2009 that San Francisco has a fine of $100 for putting garbage in the wrong bin. There are 3 different bins. The expectation must be that San Franciscans will sort through their garbage, clean it (presumably using potable water) and put it in the correct bin.
Quite apart from the waste of resources, this is a waste of time. And unfortunately for San Franciscans, the city has a profit motive to extend the idea.
That’s not economics, that’s a religious ceremony.
Summarizes quite a bit of life.
And this isn’t economics either. Its complaining.
We do generate mountains of waste, and we hope to be around for a long time. We need rational economic and political strategies for determining responsibilities, and social costs and benefits of various mechanisms to manage that waste stream, and to propagate those ideas to the appropriate interests.
This is a set of problem economics can make a difference in understanding. If we see that the issues are being largely directed by emotions and misguided perceptions, that is partly a failure of the Economics profession to focus rational study on the problems, and to persuade the public to choose the smartest strategies.
Isn’t that precisely what this post is saying? That the smartest strategy is often *not* to recycle? If economists *don’t* complain about economically inefficient practices, they’re being derelict in their duties.
Yes
including this blog post.
Externalities are not priced correctly.
In a libertarian world the starting default option is that everyone keeps and stores their garbage on their private land, sealed in airproof containers to no encroach on the air others breathe of water they drink. Then this can be commercialized, people with private land would collect and store the waste for you, paying for insurance against contamination, etc.
Then we may begin to see somewhat meaningful pricing of garbage collection, and possibly recycling.
sealed in airproof containers to no encroach on the air others breathe of water they drink.
The things we are talking about recycling here are not going to encroach on anybody’s air or water. Glass is chemically *inert*. Burying it poses no danger to anyone. Plastic may pose some dangers to wildlife if it gets into waterways, for example, but not when buried in a clay-lined pit. And our current recycling systems lead to that same clay-lined landfill anyway, since there is essentially no market for used plastic and glass. Right now, collecting them is a net negative — not just costly but also polluting the recycling stream (with fragments of broken glass and plastic) and making it harder to recycle the aluminum and cardboard that actually are economic to recycle (or would be if they weren’t mixed in with shards of broken glass).
Encroachment is fine in Libertarian world as long as the consent of the encroached is given.
I’ve given consent for many things I’ve later regretted.
This is as bad a generalization as the greens who claim all recycling is virtuous. Most municipalities deal with various levels of waste management and the costs/benefits of each system varies between municipalities and over time. Perhaps the cost/benefit analysis done at each municipality can be made more transparent and the reports standardized to allow municipality-to-municipality comparisons but I doubt that Munger has greater insight than the engineers that design and operate these systems. Perhaps the underlying waste management data is overly generalized and filtered for a non-technical audience but that is a social problem not a technical one.
If you care about the environment, you should put your bottles and other glass in the regular garbage, every time.
It probably doesn’t make much difference — either you can put the glass into the regular garbage or the waste facility will do it for you since they can’t sell it. Although glass isn’t only non-recyclable, it contaminates the rest of waste with glass shards (as some of the glass inevitably breaks when dumped into the truck). The whole ‘single-stream’ recycling approach that’s been so widely adopted is pretty much a disaster:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/
https://www.bustle.com/articles/125641-is-recycling-worth-it-the-answer-might-surprise-you
A second opinion, reinforces the first.
Plastic is especially expensive to get rid of, not just in energy consumption but also the machinery, labor and transportation.
If we made plastic from extracted atmospheric carbon, that would be carbon sequestering. We would keep it, store it in landfills for a long time, control the global warming and solve our problems. So ask yourself, in your modern world where the carbon cycle is under control: Would plastics be recycled into more plastic, or would plastics go into long term storage, or be recycled into construction materials.
Another point is that landfills aren’t really that environmentally unfriendly overall. Burying things is better than burning them. Growing trees takes carbon out of the atmosphere. You could probably sequester carbon by growing trees and then burying them, much like a landfill full of paper.
Right. The ranking fluctuates depending on market and local conditions, but biomass burial is often the cheapest and easiest form of carbon sequestration.
Here in Canada, the government is set to ban plastic bags. It won’t do much to help the environment but it makes people feel good about themselves.
Take plastic bags for example, which are public enemy number one. Conventional thinking suggests that banning single-use plastic bags will result in people using reusable bags, and that this reduction in plastic use will have a positive impact on the environment. Research from Denmark’s Ministry of the Environment actually challenged that conventional wisdom when it sought to compare the total impact of plastic bags to their reusable counterparts. The Danes found that alternatives to plastic bags came with significant negative externalities. For example, common paper bag replacements needed to be reused 43 times to have the same total impact as a plastic bag. When it came to cotton alternatives, the numbers were even higher. A conventional cotton bag alternative needed to be used over 7,100 times to equal a plastic bag, while an organic cotton bag had to be reused over 20,000 times. We know from consumer usage patterns that the likelihood of paper or cotton alternatives being used in such a way is incredibly unlikely. These results were also largely confirmed with the U.K. government’s own life-cycle assessment, which concluded that these alternatives have a significantly higher total impact on the environment.
As an aside, here is where most of the plastic in the oceans is coming from:
By analyzing the waste found in the rivers and surrounding landscape, researchers were able to estimate that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean.
Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.
We recently went to the Aquarium with the kids. Halfway through they had a small cafeteria where we could get them a snack.
Me: I’d like a three waters.
Clerk: That will be $15.
Me: What?! Just give us tap water.
Clerk: We can’t do that.
Me: Don’t you have cheaper water?
Clerk: The only water you can buy is this (shows me $5 “Voss” water in a glass bottle imported all the way from Norway).
Me: Ugh!!! Alright, give me one water and we will share it. Also, can I have some cups and straws. I don’t see any.
Clerk: We don’t carry cups or straws. Bad for the environment.
Me: How am I supposed to feed small children without a straw.
Clerk: I don’t know.
Me: Notices tiny plastic containers for ketchup and mustard. Takes a bunch and pours Voss water into them and uses them like tiny shot glasses.
i love this story.
(coda, 15 years later)
“how’d you get so good at drinking games?”
“my parents had us do ‘shots’ of water at a very young age.”