"People can lose track of cost / benefit analysis if they feel virtuous"

As I've mentioned here before, one of my gigs in life is covering local government for a media company that has an array of radio stations and a news website.

One of the monthly meetings I attend is that of our solid waste management district board, and it never fails to leave me shaking my head in bemusement at the degree of preoccupation this body has with trying to figure out what to do about cardboard. It's as if it's some kind of horror that most of it winds up in our county landfill.

That board also always gets a report from the district's education director on how many people - mostly kiddies from area schools - it takes on guided tours of the recycling center.

And, speaking of kiddies, you'll recall the episode at a city council meeting I covered at which the council was waylaid by a gaggle of schoolchildren telling it that our city needed to "up its game" in addressing the dire threat of "climate change." One council member, who also sits on the solid waste board, told the kids that local government is always trying to generate more public interest in recycling.

I sat there and thought, I reserve the right to not be interested at all. I'm going to die some day, and I don't have any minutes to spare between now and then for sorting my stinking refuse.

So it was with great delight that just now I came upon Kyle Smith's latest piece at National Review, entitled "Recycling Is A Waste."

It may make sense to recycle a few items for the savings in carbon emissions — paper, cardboard, and metals such as aluminum from cans. Recycling a ton of these items saves about three tons of carbon dioxide. Glass, plastic, rubber, all the other stuff? Not really. We used to send our plastic empties to China, but China has lost interest, as The Atlantic’s Alana Semuels reports in “Is This the End of Recycling?” The subhead reads, “Now that other countries won’t take our papers and plastics, they’re ending up in the trash.” Some municipalities are directing those recycling trucks to the nearest incinerator. A transfer station in New Hampshire reports that sending rubbish to a landfill costs $68 a ton. Recycling it? That costs $125 a ton. Wasn’t recycling supposed to save us money, not cost twice as much?

And apropos my above acknowledgement of my own mortality, Smith notes this:

Note that people can lose track of cost/benefit analysis if they feel virtuous. What about all the time it takes in the household to wash and sort all this stuff? How much is it going to cost to convert all this rubbish into usable material? Los Angeles estimates that because of recycling programs, it operates twice as many trucks as it otherwise would. “Recycling,” wrote [John] Tierney in his monumental 1996 piece [for the New York Times entitled "Recycling Is Garbage], “may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”

It appears that even pioneers of the movement can sometimes come to their senses:

If there is a Saint Paul of the recycling movement, it might be J. Winston Porter, the E.P.A. official behind an influential federal paper, The Solid Waste Dilemma: An Agenda for Action, that advised Americans in 1989 that we were running out of landfill space and that “recycling is absolutely vital.” Possibly no policy change in the last half century has proved so popular: Is there any cheaper way to purchase a sense of virtue? Tossing your Dannon container in the color-coordinated barrel is a lot more convenient than going to church, much less paying attention to the service. Yet today even Porter is questioning the recycling boom, telling Tierney that most kinds of recycling, such as composting, make no sense at all. 

Smith puts some numbers to the matter of a cost / benefit analysis:

The environmental cost of trash has been oversold. All of the trash Americans produce over the next millennium would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing, and lots of rural communities are open for business when it comes to accepting urban rubbish. There is no landfill shortage. If you’ve ever been to the U.S. Open tennis championship in Queens, you’ve seen what becomes of landfills: Arthur Ashe Stadium is built on one. Modern landfills have little environmental impact, although they do produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. New landfills capture that methane to use it for fuel, however.

Americans who perhaps have a bit more difficulty finding ways to certify their own virtue — recycling is really popular in places such as San Francisco and Park Slope, not so much in places where people actually go to church — are going to be stubborn about giving up their recycling habits. But New York City’s recycling program is a costly disaster: It runs New Yorkers $300 more to recycle a ton of trash than it would to put it in a landfill. When the next budget crunch hits New York — and that’s due approximately ten seconds after the next stock-market crash — recycling would be an excellent program to cut. Recycling that empty bottle of Poland Spring is so expensive that it’s cheaper to simply manufacture a new one. 

No, there's only one reason to recycle, and it's the same reason for undertaking any activity "strongly encouraged" by the power-mad central planners: So that you can congratulate yourself on how much you caaaaaaaaaare.