Recycling is Garbage (1996)

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/063096-tierney-magazine.html

by mhb • 11 years ago

38 55 11 years ago

nytimes.com

api• 11 years ago

The utility of recycling depends a whole lot on the material.

(1) Is the material common?

(2) Is recycling it less energy intensive than mining/refining it?

(3) Is it nasty in a landfill? Does it leak, pollute groundwater, etc.?

Aluminum, batteries, electronics, significant amounts of steel, etc. make a lot of sense to recycle. In some cases it's quite profitable without any subsidy. Glass and paper on the other hand, not so much. Paper is an agricultural product, and glass is mostly SiO2 which is an absurdly common material (sand).

As usual the truth here is a lot more complex than the sound bites.

fennecfoxen• 11 years ago

I wonder whether it takes more carbon emissions to recycle paper than it does to dump the paper in a big old landfill and sequester its carbon away, and manufacture some new paper.

smeyer• 11 years ago

http://epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/tools/warm/pdfs/BackDocFore...

Exhibit 4 has some numbers you'd probably find useful, such as the benefit or recycling in terms of tonnes of Carbon per ton of paper recycled. It looks like about 0.6-0.75 tonnes of Carbon per ton of recycled paper.

mdtancsa• 11 years ago

also depends where you are. If physical space is at a premium, extending a community's landfill's life by diversion can be worth the cost.

blacksmith_tb• 11 years ago

Of course, though in systems where the material is sorted for collection, there's a significant amount of value added for free (in fact, it's double-dipping for the haulers, since they charge for their service, and sell the sorted materials). Now, my impression from looking at curbside sorting in my neighborhood is that the value-add is not great, lots of marginal or flatly forbidden things are mixed in, so I understand that human beings still eyeball everything once more, on a conveyor belt, and then automated sorting separates things further, neither of which are free...

xamuel• 11 years ago

I think you might be making the common mistake of confusing "for free" with "using unpaid labor".

henrikschroder• 11 years ago

Moving from Sweden to California, the recycling system here is still completely bewildering to me, and makes very little sense.

Where I'm from, recycling started by grabbing simple low-hanging fruit. Newspapers. Aluminium cans. Glass bottles and jars. And it doesn't all go into one "recycling bin", but each thing is separated. Later, that expanded so you can now also recycle metal cans, plastic containers and cardboard. If you want to.

And the default was never landfill, instead all household trash is incinerated for heat and electricity. Sweden even imports trash to burn! And in the case people throw the "wrong" things in general trash, the incinerators can handle it, they're very good at exhaust filtering, and I bet you can even mine the residue for rare materials.

And that all makes sense to me. I can see the economics of it, and I can see the environmental impact of sorting. But the California system of one big "recycling" bin that you're supposed to throw god-knows-what in is completely opaque to me. How does anything useful come out of that? How much labour is needed to sort it at the station?

stephengillie2• 11 years ago

This article discusses some of the problems in the "one-bin" system.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/american-rec...

ZeroGravitas2• 11 years ago

There's videos on YouTube of "single-stream" MRF facilities. I think Ars Technica just visited one and did a story on the machines involved. They use all sorts of cool tech like computer vision to sort flakes of plastic with tiny jets of air, eddy currents and magnets to sort metal and sonic imploders to disintegrate glass.

There are people involved to pull out things that would jam the machines, but generally it's fairly automatable.

Inside New York City’s newest recycling center - Machines use science to separate a stream of waste into valuable raw materials.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/inside-new-york-citys...

Recycling in the US: An off-again, on-again love affair - It became a booming industry despite facing a series of intractable tradeoffs.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-a...

a2tech• 11 years ago

When I tell people that digging through our trash at work to recover some semi-recyclable plastic they're not really saving anything except for recycling companies bottom line I get looked at like I'm some horrid monster.

Recycling non-rare/poisonous materials is a scam designed to make the general population think they're helping the Earth while the industries that do the real polluting can continue on uninterrupted. An improvement of 1-2 mpg in over the road trucks (semis) will make a vast difference in the amount of road pollution generated.

JoeAltmaier12• 11 years ago

From a money point of view, sure.

But consider the Earth like some large spaceship. Folks are supposed to take turns cleaning the oxygen recyclers. Somebody says "Hey, I can earn more imaginary merit points by organizing a birthday party, or 100 other things"

So nobody cleans the oxygen recycler, and they all die.

Recycling is an inevitable outcome of living in a closed-system life-support system. Like our planet. Its gotta be done, regardless of the micro-optimizations folks make up to excuse themselves from doing it.

vectorjohn5• 11 years ago

I don't know if you read any of the article - it doesn't sound like it - but I'd be interested to hear your response to some of its claims.

Mainly, sure, Earth is like a space ship, but waste disposal is not like cleaning the oxygen system. You take all your garbage, bury it in a landfill, and problem solved. We have nearly limitless space to bury garbage, and when it comes time, we can bury garbage in old landfill sites.

That is, for anything that isn't rare or hazardous. So what do you have to say about that? I'm curious because I do recycle all I reasonably can, but it sounds like that isn't really helpful.

stcredzero• 11 years ago

"Hey, I can earn more imaginary merit points by organizing a birthday party, or 100 other things"...So nobody cleans the oxygen recycler, and they all die.

Only in an oppressive system, where people are restricted in how they can distribute their merit points, sure. Given enough freedom and a high enough population, however, and people will start to pay another merit points so they can earn more merit points as a star birthday party planner.

akamaka• 11 years ago

I don't think it's fair to say recycling is "designed" to be "scam".

In my city, the recycling program was designed to meet specific waste diversion goals. There is no empty land for new dumps within city limits, and the cost of shipping waste elsewhere is high. It's a rational economic decision.

Yes, reducing world-wide air pollution would make a bigger difference. Sure, you might find some specific cities that are running recycling programs in an uneconomic way. And, if you feel like informing your coworkers that they aren't saving the earth, you're not lying to them.

But recycling programs, by and large, are not a scam to make people feel better. They save money.

laurentoget• 11 years ago

I wish there was some reliable data to support or refute this argument.

rgupta1• 11 years ago

If we dumped all the trash in your backyard, I'm sure the data would be obvious ;)

homulilly2• 11 years ago

Recycling is popular because, especially in America where we don't even sort our materials. It provides a zero effort way for people to feel like they're helping the environment. The only real way to produce less waste is to consume less and most people aren't interested in actually inconveniencing themselves.

andallas• 11 years ago

"...especially in America where we don't even sort our materials."

I've lived an 7 states from coast to coast, north and south, and in all but 2 we sorted our materials. Just because it doesn't happen where you are from doesn't mean it's not happening everywhere else.

homulilly2• 11 years ago

I'm curious how much sorting is the norm where you've been. Where I've lived "sorting" recycling has simply been one bin for glass and another for everything else which barely counts.

stephengillie2• 11 years ago

This article discusses the problems that are created by "one-binning" our recycling:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/american-rec...

The problems are mostly a collision of too much recycling, too much expectation for post-bin sorting, a disconnect about the value of recyclable materials (glass is heavy but almost worthless), outfall of the death of the newspaper industry, and reduction in packaging materials (thinner plastic bottles, movement from coffee cans to coffee bags).

In the City of Seattle, they were paying about $50/ton to landfill trash in 2011. A city official said they were only working with Cedar Grove while the costs for recycle and compost were below that. The city is mentioned in the article for the addition of composting to its recycling program, and how this keeps more trash out of landfills.

a8da6b0c91d• 11 years ago

The only real way to produce less waste is to consume less

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwcap_-9tuA&t=0m20s

Having only two kids and ending all immigration makes more sense. Population growth utterly dwarfs the impact of any feasible consumption reduction approaches.

pvaldes• 11 years ago

or package better...

thaddeusmt• 11 years ago

A Planet Money recently talked about which items are recyclable, which are not, and how global economic trends effect them. Like how China buys our recycled plastic, unless oil prices dip low enough it's cheaper to make new plastic.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/27/395815221/episo...

Also, this article is from 1996? I'd like to know what has changed (and what hasn't) in the last 20 years.

jaderobbins12• 11 years ago

Re: article from 1996

That is exactly what I was wondering. It would be awesome to have a follow up on this!

ZeroGravitas2• 11 years ago

Recycling (and the intertwined issue of global warming) are hot button items for those who believe in unrestrained free markets as they're both widely popular examples of government interventions into markets.

Luckily the US has lots of political pundits ready to save us from leftist plots like climate change, recycling and evolution.

Eric_WVGG• 11 years ago

If you want the snarkier, video version of this argument: Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit” episode on recycling — http://www.sho.com/sho/penn-and-teller-bullshit/home?episode...

I wasn’t quite convinced, but they make a few cogent points.

the “Straight Dope” rebuttal to the NYT article: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2346/is-recycling-w... — among his points is that recycling is effectively an experiment. Twenty years of ensuing data should be regarded before taking anything in the NYT piece at face value.

JoeAltmaier12• 11 years ago

Yeah I'm convinced by Penn and Teller of only one thing: they want to be hip and snarky and sell views. Because their arguments are lazy and mean and rarely cogent.

beefman• 11 years ago

The first thing to realize is that trash is only a problem by some guilt-ridden religious argument. Civilization takes its materials from the ground and it can return them there quite easily. It was John McCarthy who first convinced me (all my life a recycling crusader) of this.[1]

Recycling therefore only makes sense when its energy balance is positive. Aluminum and steel are the only materials for which it is, or ever will be.[2] The process could be greatly simplified by having two bins: "mostly metal" and "everything else".

[1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/

[2] And lithium in car batteries. But they're not a municipal issue.

Animats• 11 years ago

It's frustrating. Aluminum is a big win. Steel is a modest win. Paper used to be a modest win, but with the demise of printed newspapers, it's not any more. Cardboard can be recycled, but each time it goes around, the fibers get shorter and it becomes more fragile. Glass unsorted by color is not too useful.

JoeAltmaier12• 11 years ago

Amusing: around here, aluminum cans go to the local steel recycling plant. Carloads of cans are dumped into the molten steel vat, to precipitate out sulphur. Then the aluminum and sulphur is poured off and hauled to the landfill as slag.

So, its recycling, sort of. And it goes for a useful purpose. But its not new aluminum.

Tharkun• 11 years ago

Over here in Belgium, recyclables are sorted by the consumer: glass by colour, paper, plastic/aluminium drink containers, compostables. Whatever is left is burnt for power generation. It's not a perfect system, a lot of plastic especially ends up being burnt. But it's a pretty decent system.

Please don't think that your head-in-the-sand attitude is a good one in any way. Recycling isn't perfect, but polluting oceans or landfills is a lot worse. Dead wildlife, toxic sushi, decreased land value are all real problems.

And sure, getting the mileage of your gas guzzling SUVs up by 1mpg would be nice as well, but please don't delude yourself into removing all personal responsibility here.

zo13• 11 years ago

Has anyone else noticed the unusually-high level of indoctrination that goes on regarding recycling/environmentalism in schools? I remember spending countless hours in school as a small child being taught to "heal the world" and "green something" or other. Or cartoons: "Captain Planet" anyone? There were large concerts that were held place at the schools I attended, talking about the topic, singalongs, etc. And then there were the huge "scary number" scenarios: "If each person in the world, turned off X for Y time every time they did B, then we would have saved X,000,000,000 million somethings of C".

I'll leave the discussion of pro/cons regarding recycling et al aside. I am a tad bit disturbed at how intensely I was bombarded as a child to believe in these things. I exaggerate a little in my examples, but these things existed and happened to me, as an innocent blank-slate child.

ptx2• 11 years ago

Recycling etc. is tedious and inconvenient (much easier just to ignore it!), so why would people do it unless society emphatically instills that it's important?

Recycling is Garbage (1996)

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