From an editorial in Investors Business Daily.
plenty of “recyclables” end up in landfills, in part because of “single stream” recycling. That’s where residents can put everything in the same bin — a switch designed to encourage more recycling. But it results in more stuff that can’t be recycled because it’s “contaminated.” One study found that about 30% of plastic collected in these “single stream” bins can’t be recycled.
Read the whole thing. In Specialization and Trade, I make the point that if recycling truly saved resources, then the market would pay you to recycle. Instead, the editorial notes that “the market for recyclable materials has collapsed as supply increases and demand subsides.”
Aren’t there externalities involved?
It may save resources but the market price does not reflect that.
If landfill space isn’t free, then the cost of filling up landfills is internalized.
There is saving resources and then there is pollution.
Usually, the price of pollution is not captured in the price of a product.
Pollution taxes are a great idea.
Recycling produces pollution as well.
One argument that I’ve heard in favour of recycling is that landfill deliberately underpriced to discourage illegal dumping. In this view government directed recycling is an attempt to compensate for this distortion.
I suspect the vast majority of household recycling would be more efficiently dealt with by sending to landfill, at least here in the UK.
I’d have quite recycling already, but my wife would be unhappy. And if I were really feeling cynical/honest, I’d suggest to her that recycling may make people behave worse overall, since it’s such a cheap, easy, empty source of ‘virtue’ in people’s moral balance sheets (substituting for more difficult and genuine virtuous acts). However, that lead me to hunt for a link to one of the studies and I ran across this that I hadn’t seen before:
https://www.livescience.com/27729-morality-changes-ethical-behavior.html
If that’s right, perhaps you should recycle if your ethics are deontological but probably not if you’re a utilitarian (and, BTW, doesn’t this suggest that if you’re a utilitarian, maybe you should switch to deontology on utilitarian grounds?)
‘if recycling truly saved resources, then the market would pay you to recycle’
Why does this not apply to all of government?
Because the root of these issues is the allocation of responsibility. That requires democratic consent.
If economics is going to be good for anything, it has to provide tools for the public to use when it considers this allocation. Markets act marginally. We can’t wish away our waste streams, but we can decide on allocation of responsibilities that make marginal incentives better line up with our broader social responsibilities. Economics can provide frameworks to properly do this.
How about some better answers from economists?
Whether or not there is an environmental benefit to recycling, it remains striking that so many people, so faithfully, and with such strong conviction make the effort to separate recyclables for pickup.
People don’t just give lip service to recycling the way they do to most other civic and personal virtues. They really take the trouble to do it. What other civic activity enjoys such genuine and universal support? What social phenomenon compares?
Further, enthusiasm for household recycling remains strong even after almost 40 years, during which time almost no products made of recyclable materials have become part of our everyday lives, and few people can make even a wrong guess as to what happens to their separated-out newspapers, mail circulars, glass bottles, etc., after they’re picked up at the curbside.
The whole thing verges on the near-religious.
Indeed. It could be seen as a community conformance ritual, replacing weekly churchgoing and similar activities. There are too few such things left in modern Western countries to squander them on the basis of being perhaps somewhat economically inefficient given some assumptions about externalities.
Steve, your comment may be the most trenchant I’ve seen on this matter.
The EU has imposed limits on landfills in member states. Countries like England are responding by generating power through waste incineration. That could be an option here too I suppose but it would be hard to compete against all the tax-subsidies for solar and wind. I wonder too whether simply mining landfills for resources would be more efficient than compensating recyclers directly. I have seen entrepreneurs with pickups making the rounds on trash collection day salvaging metal and aluminum cans from recycling bins.
I might add one more observation: pursuant to the heuristic discussed below, which tells us to “do what everybody else is going”, or “do what other people expect you to do”: Household recycling is further remarkable in that nobody sees you do it.
There is no way to ostentatiously recycle and earn extra virtue points. The plastic recycling bin on your tree lawn could very well be empty for all your neighbors know. But those bins are pretty much all filled, every week.
“Household recycling is further remarkable in that nobody sees you do it.”
Sure they do. Anybody who’s been to your house is going to see where the garbage and recycling go. And if you wheel out an empty bin, that’s half the effort of recycling (and eventually somebody would notice). “Stuff White People Like” covered this perfectly:
https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/14/66-recycling/
But also — the extra virtue points are things that people award themselves even if nobody else is watching. And a way to earn virtue points with no monetary cost and little effort? Genius. There’s little wonder people love it (and would be sorry rather than pleased to hear that, no, recycling really doesn’t help the environment and they needn’t bother anymore).
One of the soundbites that I’ve tried using with my progressive friends is , “Recycling plastic bottles and composting kitchen scraps kills poor people.”
It has been successful in a few instances in starting a conversation about where social resources can best be put to use. I try to start off by enthusiastically agreeing that recycling aluminum and cardboard is great. Then I try to work through the logic of how disposing of plastic bottles and kitchen scraps in landfill, including all the environmental costs is cheaper than trying to recycle them. We can then use the money we save to help poor people.
By focusing on the tradeoff of helping for the poor, I immediately signal that I’m not trying to defect from the progressive social contract they envision.
I read once that recycling paper actually reduces the number of trees in the world. Recycling reduces demand for virgin paper, which comes from trees that are specifically grown on farms for the purpose of producing paper. The reduced demand causes land to be repurposed from growing trees to other uses. Can anyone confirm or refute this story?
BC: Imagine that people stopped eating chicken or chicken eggs. Don’t you think there would be fewer chickens in the world 10 years later? I’m pretty sure no one would bother to raise chickens anymore, and there would be hardly any left.
To the extent that trees (the ones used for paper) are privately owned, what you said makes perfect sense.
I suspect agricultural viability is a bigger issue. The forested area in New England has doubled from the lows of about 1830 when farms and pastures started to be abandoned, while in many other parts of the world, forests that weren’t suited for paper production are being cleared for agriculture.
“I make the point that if recycling truly saved resources, then the market would pay you to recycle.”
As it does of course. It’s called “the scrap metal trade” and the %ge of each metal recycled rises with the profit to be made from doing so. Near 100% of all gold ever extracted is still being recycled. Perhaps 40 or 50% of all aluminium is recycled. Very little mercury as we use less of it these days than we used to.
Used gold has a high positive price, used aluminium a lower positive one and used mercury likely a negative one.
Yes.
Recycled steel, not imports are what killed the old steel giants like US Steel. As the recyclers figured out how to produce higher quality steels from lower quality scrap, the need for new steel decreased. Politically the US producers are well connected and that is why we have the insane tariff discussions as the primary producers try to protect themselves from the impacts of the growth in recycled steel.
I’ve written many a piece making that steel recycling point. It’s Nucor (the masters of the arc furnace business) that killed then integrated steel plants.
Which is why it’s such fun (in a dark manner) to see DiMicco calling for steel tariffs and protection. He’s using the example of the integrated plants his own company killed to argue that his own plants should gain protection.