Mike Munger — the EconTalk regular — was asked to keynote an “Australia Recycles” conference years ago:
We scrap cars because they are valuable metal. The leftover rice and chicken go into the fridge, for tomorrow’s casserole. And toilet paper…well, we throw it away, after using it.
I focused on glass, especially the kind of green glass used for wine bottles. Glass is heavy and inert. That means it’s expensive to cart around and handle, in addition to the problems of breaking and cutting workers. Glass is harmless in a landfill and breaks down into something very like the sand it came from.
The commodity that glass can be ground into, called “cullet,” just isn’t very valuable. Mixed cullet, even from glass that looks similar, turns a dull black; sorting to avoid mixing takes time. Recyclists seem to believe that everything should be conserved, except time, the one resource we can’t make more of.
The alternative to recycling green glass is to use virgin materials — sand — and add the chemical compounds and color required. A cubic yard of mixed cullet can actually be much more expensive to convert into usable glass than a cubic yard of sand, depending on conditions. That means that “recycling,” when you add on the fuel costs and pollution impact of collecting small quantities of the stuff from neighborhoods, actually uses more energy, and wastes more resources, than using virgin materials.
There are exceptions. If disposal costs are high and there is actual demand for the cullet, then green glass is highly recyclable. The best example is northern California, with valuable land, a large population, and lots of manufacturers eager to put new wine in recycled bottles.
Still, given the costs and lack of demand in most areas, opportunities for environmentally responsible recycling of green glass are rare. As a result, hundreds of municipalities across the United States have tried to suspend their glass recycling programs.[1] Interestingly, in some of these (including my home town of Raleigh, North Carolina) there were legal or political barriers that forced the resumption of curbside glass collection. Citizens voted to force the city to pick up the glass in those plastic bins, because they don’t like to throw the glass away. The glass is picked up, trucked to the recycling facility, and either bagged or boxed and then shipped, in a different truck, to the landfill. In effect, citizens are paying the city extra to throw away the glass, so that they can pretend it’s being recycled.[2]
As I was going through my presentation, I was surprised at the reaction of the audience of the conference. They weren’t angry; they were bored. When I finished, a man stood up and gave what seemed to be the response of the entire audience, given their nods and smiles: “Look, professor, we all know this. Everyone knows that there are problems with green glass. We all understand that there is no market for cullet. But it doesn’t matter. The main thing is to get people in the habit of recycling, because it’s the right thing to do.”
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, since everyone in attendance made their living from selling recycling equipment to cities and local governments. But let’s be fair: no one in that room was cynical. No one thought this was fraud the way I did. Recycling gives people a chance to express their concern about the environment, and concern about the environment is good. Sure, sometimes the actual effect on the environment is harmful, as in the case of green glass, but that’s a small price to pay for developing the right habits of mind. I wasn’t wrong, I just didn’t understand their objectives.
“Look, professor, we all know this. Everyone knows that there are problems with green glass. We all understand that there is no market for cullet. But it doesn’t matter. The main thing is to get people in the habit of recycling, because it’s the right thing to do.”
My religio-meter broke upon reading that.
On this episode, Penn and Teller trash the concept of recycling; they even try to mock the sorting of it: Bullshit! – Recycling
Good grief.