Recycling sure is a “feel good” idea. It tickles that part of our brain that is naturally drawn to the principle of conservation and of avoiding waste.
“Of course, recycling is a good idea.”, we think, “It’s only a shame that the government has to force the practice upon the troglodytes among us who aren’t enlightened enough to see what a great idea it is!”
Not that much force is needed. The government has been pushing the recycling propaganda pretty hard for a long time now. “Reduce, reuse, recycle!” you’ll sometimes hear your brainwashed children sing.
They learned that in school. For the adults, there’s the commercials on TV pushing the recycling mantra. But at least in this case, the propaganda is for a good cause, right?
Nope.
Recycling is a great idea — if it makes economic sense. After all, the point of recycling isn’t just to “save resources”. The point is to produce the things we want (and get rid of the resulting trash) in the least costly manner, remembering to take all costs into consideration.
That means that sometimes recycling makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t. This is because the process of recycling consumes a whole bunch of resources too: more trucks, more cans, more barges, more labor, more sorting facilities, more production facilities, more use of water as we “rinse off” our trash, etc.
And at each step along the way, much much more pollution.
And since government on various levels has socialized a bunch of the steps in this chain — including most landfills — it’s impossible to evaluate the true costs involved. No market prices = no economic calculation. See the master, Ludwig von Mises. He’ll tell ya.
We do know that for some items, recycling is obviously stupid. Plastics for example. Plastics are almost impossible to sort, they degrade erratically, and the carbon emissions from the recycling process are a whopping 55x higher than just putting them in a landfill. Even just “eyeballing” the costs, it’s obvious that recycling plastic is counter-productive.
For this reason, the majority of the plastic that US citizens carefully sort out and put in recycling bins just got (until about 7 years ago) shipped off to China. There, they picked out what they could use, and dumped much of the rest into rivers where it ended up feeding into the crisis of plastic pollution in our oceans.
We should have just thrown all that plastic in a landfill. Our “feel good” measures actually contribute to massive pollution.
What about other items? Do any make sense to recycle? Without prices, it’s hard to say. There’s some reason to think that clean cardboard can be recycled profitably. And there is good reason to think that the rare materials in our electronics (phones, computers, batteries, etc) can be recycled profitably.
But the rest of that trash? Probably not.
Many Americans will recoil from all this economics talk. “Who cares, egghead? Where are we going to put the trash if we don’t recycle? We don’t have enough landfills!”
Wrong again. This myth began in the late ‘80s and we haven’t managed to shake it. We have more than enough room. A landfill 100 yards deep and 35 miles across on each side would be large enough to hold all the trash Americans will generate for the next 1,000 years.
And that’s assuming we do nothing with the landfills. I once played golf near Los Angeles on a lovely, hilly course with grass and trees. It was beautiful. Somewhere around the turn, my buddy told me we were playing on a landfill. I literally didn’t believe him. But I looked it up and it was true.
So “throwing things away” when it doesn’t make economic sense to recycle them isn’t a problem. We have plenty of room. We just need to stop lying to ourselves.
Fortunately, many large cities have recently abandoned their stupid recycling programs. It’s not a perfect solution. We should have totally free markets in all aspects of our life, including trash. But it’s a start.
It’s a very good thing that as societies rise up from dire poverty and get wealthier, they naturally become more focused on improving their environment. Once our more basic needs are met, people naturally seek to improve their environment too — unless stupid government comes along to ruin that process.
I poached a lot of the stats for this post from this article and this video. Check ‘em out if you want a deeper dive into… trash.
Thanks for reading!
Naturally,
Adam
Want to learn more about how to “think like an economist”? Check out Liberty Classroom!
Is nothing sacred? I want something sacred.
Ouch. So the solution is to create more waste so we can have more and bigger landfills so we can have more golf courses…. Or free up the market so we can recycle smartly, and possibly reduce/ reuse along the way. 😎