The Recycling Myth

by maxwell • 17 years ago

44 36 17 years ago

What is being described here is how the Swedish government is externalising costs. Of coarse it looks good, and profitable on paper because most of the costs (and environmental effects) have been put onto the population.

As the article mentions this is bad for the environment.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

So, there was basically a glaring hole in the logic of the article, and I was wondering if there's anyone else here that can answer it for me....

Garbage is already a big externality. A positive one. The government takes care of hauling away your trash and disposing of it, somewhere, and you get to benefit from the economies of scale of centralizing this.

The truly individualist, libertarian thing to do with your garbage is not to leave it on the curb for the government to pick up. It's to bury it in your backyard.

What's that you say? "Not in my back yard"?

I had a couple actual questions buried in the snark. Is it still legal to bury trash in your own back yard, on your own property, assuming you take the necessary precautions to prevent it from seeping into groundwater? And if so, would you - or the article's author - do so?

And if someone wanted to start a garbage collection corporation, using land they own, that they've lined so it doesn't leech into groundwater, and hauling away garbage with their own trucks, would the government stop them? I don't think so, but I dunno if it's ever been tried. I think that they'd quickly find out that skipping every other house on the block because they aren't a customer isn't very cost-effective, instead.

I don't think it's necessarily wrong to externalize costs back onto the population if they initially came from the population. It's like complaining about the free food your employer gives you, when there's nothing stopping you from getting your own food elsewhere. (I admit that I've been guilty of that on occasion, but at least I don't write articles - from a libertarian/anarchist POV - about how the government owes me convenient garbage disposal.)

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

yes, the government would stop them. just like they go after kids on bikes trying to deliver mail. the monopoly is all they have to legitimize them.

HeyLaughingBoy• 17 years ago

* I think that they'd quickly find out that skipping every other house on the block because they aren't a customer isn't very cost-effective, instead.*

I don't understand why. This is exactly how trash pickup in my area works: there are multiple companies and they only pickup for their own customers. To add insult to injury, I live in a very low-density rural county. Since these guys have been in business for years, I have to assume they're profitable!

soundsop• 17 years ago

The basic premise is that (in Sweden) the uncounted cost of cleaning and sorting waste and driving to dispose of it is greater than the savings due to recycling. It would have been nice to see at least an order-of-magnitude calculation estimating the uncounted cost. If the cost is so obviously greater than the savings of recycling, then a simple estimation should be sufficient.

The author is probably right, but some concrete numbers would go a long way to supporting his argument.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

Why is he 'probably right' without proof ?

I remember when I was a kid that factories were paying for old paper and old glass. A whole generation made their pocket money that way. If it was worth something back then I would expect it to be worth something today.

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

I don't know if he is right. But I doubt that a completely manual sorting and cleaning process is the most efficient we can do. Sorting and cleaning waste industrially, using the right tools for the job, has to be better.

Also, there are numerous studies showing how much more efficient public transport is compared to people using their own cars. Now they make people drive waste bags around in their own cars. That has got to be a very bad idea.

theschwa• 17 years ago

The title really should be "The Myth of Forced Recycling"

I guarantee you there are efficient and even profitable ways to recycle, but those not only don't require the use of force but will be made less efficient by its presence.

That being said... Why is this on HN? I would prefer to keep more political topics off of here. Mises.org has some really good technology and Intellectual Property right related articles, but people might be inclined to ignore the source if they're already inclined to believe that it will be off topic.

proemeth• 17 years ago

This is more economic than politic. The government creates an incentive to sort garbage, which should lead to new businesses creation and better overall management of garbage/recycling.

The article suggests that people have to sort their garbage themselves, but they could pay someone to do it for them. This is similar to carbon taxes philosophy, create an incentive by making consumers bear the cost of inefficiencies, then some company will find a way to improve things, this reducing those costs.

marknutter4• 17 years ago

> The government creates an incentive to sort garbage, which should lead to new businesses creation and better overall management of garbage/recycling.

Either way, citizens will be forced to pay these new businesses to do this task, and most will probably still continue to do it themselves to save money. This recycling program is basically a massive tax on the populace, hidden under the guise of environmentalism. Not to mention it's probably much more difficult to start a business in Sweden than here in the states. I would imagine the Swedish government would take issue with companies profiting off of government programs. That, or there's some other red-tape involved, otherwise we'd already see these garbage sorting companies in existence (it's the first thing I thought of too when I was reading the article).

xcombinator2• 17 years ago

Typical american mindset: Everything is money. Use something, throwaway when don't needed, bury it, contaminate the soil, the seas, it's cheaper.

Of course they are external cost to recycle, what he doesn't say is that THEY ARE EXTERNAL COST TO NOT RECYCLING. Nature knows that since long long ago, she recycles everything.

The Pacific is filled with polymers just because people love to use plastics and don't recycle them, fishes dye (external cost) every day because they confuse it with jellyfish. Jellyfish plague the seas(external cost).

Plastics additives are getting to our food chain(external cost). Our water contaminated by flame retardants and biphenols A when you bury it are affecting us (external cost).

If you want to make new paper you need to contaminate the rivers (Think about International Paper corp.). Making aluminium from oxide, instead of melting takes an exorbitant quantity of energy(external cost).

This article is pure demagogy, if he want to be serious he needs to put numbers over the table.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

Fishes dye ? You mean they change colour because they ingest polymers ? Or you mean they die ?

My money is on the 'expiry' :)

Anyway, you make excellent points, and the article is spouting typical industry grade bs.

Resources are finite.

A guy called 'Eckart Wintzen' promoted a concept he called 'taxing resources removed', which essentially is the opposite of 'value added tax'. His idea was that you should pay taxes on those resources that you remove from the biosphere, and that products made from recycled goods ought to be tax free.

I think it was an excellent concept.

felipe• 17 years ago

Eckart Wintzen is my hero since I worked at his company, Origin, back in the 90s. He actually implemented that concept at Origin: We had to track and estimate the footprint of each project, and then the amount was reinvested in environmental projects.

Recently I have created a methodology inspired by that experience at Origin: http://www.scribd.com/doc/5507536/Sustainable-Software-Engin...

More info about Eckart Wintzen (who passed away recently): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.11/es_wintzen_pr.html

xcombinator2• 17 years ago

Sorry for the typo.

Fishes die everyday because they eat polymers and can't digest it, their stomachs fill and there is no space for food.

It's normal to discover dead sharks and whales with their stomachs filled or nearly filed.

camccann2• 17 years ago

There's an external cost (or benefit) to everything. Fully calculating the impact of a given action on everyone else would be absurdly computationally intractable, particularly for extremely diffuse or probabilistic effects. So, the question to ask must be not "what are the externalities of this action", but "what externalities are significant enough to take into account"?

The author of the article is concentrating on obvious costs felt independently by individuals, and ignoring diffuse non-economic benefits (such as... not accumulating huge piles of trash filled with difficult-to-recover resources). He's quite possibly correct anyway that it's a poor trade-off, or that it's at least poorly implemented, but he really isn't making a persuasive case, especially given the lack of any actual non-anecdotal evidence of what the costs and benefits are.

m_eiman• 17 years ago

I don't know which part of Sweden the author lives in, but it's apparently not my part. In our trash room here we have bins for glass (white/coloured), paper, batteries and garbage. Card board boxes and other "big" stuff (basically anything that isn't normal consumables) is left at the recycling station (and assuming you do that on your way to work and don't go once per item, the extra energy needed is next to nothing).

I'd say that he's trying very hard to make a point, and exaggerates.

unwind• 17 years ago

I live in a (rent-controlled) apartment in Stockholm. Our apartment building does not have a trash room; all storage needs to happen in the apartment. The recycling center is easily reachable on foot though, so there's no driving involved.

For people living in the suburbs, the nearest station can easily be a kilometer or so away, which might be further than you're willing to walk, carrying a week or two's worth of recyclable materials.

Like many other commenters below, I too reacted at the single-minded economical focus of the article, while still agreeing that the current recycling system is a bit ... annoying, heh.

yardie• 17 years ago

I used to live in a suburb. It was still developing so there was no local trash pickup. Not enough residents to pay for a truck to come and the trash company wouldn't provide the service at an agreeable price. Almost everyone through the bag of trash on the trunk (boot) of the car and drove to the dumpster while heading to work.

There was recycling bins but no one used them. Carrying one bag (unrestrained) was tricky enough, adding 3 smaller ones was too much work.

The thing with recycling is it has to be convenient to be effective. Even if there is a small price to pay. And people will do it without even thinking about it. Previously it was only glass and cardboard. Then they added aluminum, plastic, and small appliances. It went from 3 bins to 5. Now there are two, one for recyclables and one for everything else. The center sorts it for us (us being my parents since I moved away).

henrikschroder2• 17 years ago

I also live in Sweden, and in all the places I've lived, recycling has always been optional. If you don't want to recycle anything, you can just throw everything in the general trash, and noone will know or complain or charge you extra for it.

That said, I read an article many years ago by the head of our environmental protection agency, and he rightfully pointed out the externalizing of the cost of sorting on the population, but most importantly he pointed out that recycling of some materials is completely negative, i.e. it is cheaper and uses less energy to create fresh material than recycle the old.

The materials that did make sense to recycle though was glass, newspaper and aluminium cans. By not recycling milk cartons or plastic containers, you're doing more for the environment than if you recycle them.

The lesson learned is of course that you should always have science to back up your viewpoint, only by making a lifecycle analysis can you find out if a certain activity really is good for the environment, or if it's only good for your conscience.

marknutter4• 17 years ago

I've never understood why we recycle glass. It doesn't seem like the materials to make glass are in short supply. Is it just much more costly to gather them new than to melt down existing glass containers?

lurkinggrue• 17 years ago

There was a definite "OMG the socialism is the evil!" bend to that article. I was almost expecting to read about forced recycling labor camps where they eat babies.

I am not discounting problems in Swedish recycling but the article was a bit over the top.

wisty• 17 years ago

There's an easy solution. Put a deposit (tax) on bottles, that gets refunded when the bottle gets recycled.

If it's worth a 10 cent "sin tax" for me to chuck a Cola bottle away, the that's my choice. If somebody can sort my garbage (because they really need the money, or they have a high-tech robot that can sort trash really well, or whatever else), then they win as well.

parboman• 17 years ago

this is already done in Sweden.

yagiz• 17 years ago

And in Turkey, for some bottles.

dreur• 17 years ago

And in Canada

marknutter4• 17 years ago

Turning an entire nation of people into homeless bottle collectors. Genius. Maybe everyone could get a government issued grocery cart too.

jkmcf• 17 years ago

It's done in the US as well, though mostly in the East, I think.

barrkel3• 17 years ago

> The structure works the way all centrally planned structures work: it increases and centralizes power while the attempted (expected) results do not materialize

I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front. Central planning has never achieved an expected result? There was never a successful corporation? Nor a military operation? Really?

If you're going to be an ideological shill, at least try to hide it a bit better.

gaius• 17 years ago

Errm, actually (modern) militaries are highly decentralized. The corporal on the ground has a great deal of latitude and is expected to show initiative and creativity.

Contrast that with the highly centralized militaries of WW1 - the attempted result wasn't "get bogged down for 4 years while our troops are mass-slaughtered".

barrkel3• 17 years ago

I think you've missed my point. The article writer made a ridiculously strong claim: that no centralized structure ever worked. Only a single counterexample is needed to show that this is a dodgy claim, but counterexamples to this aren't rare, they're abundant. In particular, any time the efficiency costs of centralization are less than the transaction costs of decentralized parts cooperating, centralization is a win. There's a reason we've evolved brains.

Coming up with examples where decentralization beat centralization, on the other hand, proves nothing.

camccann2• 17 years ago

I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front.

Why is this? Most people, myself included, have at least a few "ridiculous biases" in their heads. I find it much easier to take an argument seriously when the biases are obvious. I may quickly decide that the argument is wrong, but at least I can make that decision.

Someone as far out into the ideological fringe as this article is going to be making a skewed argument no matter what. Would you really prefer that they did it in such a way that you never noticed the bias?

barrkel3• 17 years ago

Well, there's ridiculous biases, and then there's ridiculous biases.

It's a matter of degree. Economics is a discipline which is all too susceptible to story-telling. Given a bias, almost any situation can be argued one way or the other by telling the appropriate story, and emphasising and underemphasising the various elements. So overt bias tends to lead me to suspect any given tale of economics likely has relatively little information and won't sound nearly as decisive if the sources are investigated. Making this decision to discount on the basis of evidence of bias is much cheaper than actually investigating the sources, of course; instead, I'll reserve such investigation for those stories which seem interesting but don't have obvious bias.

And in this case, the bias is extremely blatant and very silly. The author has stated right up front that there is only one way they could possibly tell the story they're going to tell, it can only end up one way, and they have no motivation to look for counterexamples.

In fact, the story may have some truth, may be a lot of truth, but the bias and the ease of manipulative storytelling in the discipline tell me that it's not worth my time investigating deeper. FWIW, I object to moralistic, almost religious, edicts to recycle. I'd much rather pay someone else to handle that problem. So I'm even on the side of the author's end goal; but I have no respect for the author's tale.

The Recycling Myth

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