We've since moved to a bin system where we don't pay directly either for landfill or recycling, so the price disparity will likely have narrowed somewhat, mostly by increasing the amount by which the Council subsidizes landfill use from rates. I wouldn't say that paying for trash pickup from rates rather than paying per piece is inefficient: the best evidence suggests that the transactions costs of running a per-unit payment system outweigh any distortions caused by lump-sum pricing. But it will make recycling look relatively less costly.
Kevin Libin in the National Post lays out some hard facts on recycling.
“People say you can’t recycle too much. It turns out you can,” says Mr. Porter, president of the environmental consulting firm, the Waste Policy Center, near Washington, D.C. “If you spend enough money, you can recycle anything. That doesn’t mean you should.”I like the last bit. In my lecture on environmental economics, I note that if Christchurch went through a landfill the size of our current Kate Valley facility every year instead of every thirty years, and if we were building new landfills on prime irrigated dairy land instead of scrub wasteland, the cost of buying land for landfill would still be only about $2 per person per year. Absolutely trivial.
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A 2003 study by Enviros Environmental Consultants UK found that “from a global warming perspective, there is limited environmental benefit to using recycled glass” but continuing with the exercise of recycling was “an important part of the UK meeting its overall glass recycling targets.” That is, so politicians could meet their set goals, even if there was no environmental point to it.
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San Francisco’s Department of Waste recently calculated it paid $4,000 a tonne to recycle plastic bags. Its resale price for the recycled product? $32. “Nobody wants it. There’s no value. It doesn’t make sense,” says Joseph Gho, CEO of EPI Environmental Products Inc., a Vancouver manufacturer of biodegradable plastics. “Besides the financial, the economic cost, you’ve got the environmental cost” of recycling unwanted material. “The trucks running out there, burning fuel … you have to use energy, you’ve got CO2 emissions.”
That’s why curbside recycling requires, wherever it’s implemented, millions of tax dollars to stay afloat: the inputs required are greater than the savings. Even in New York City, where area land is some of the most expensive on the continent, it costs $240 to deal with a ton of recyclables, compared to the $130 a ton of landfills, says Angela Logomasini, Director of Risk and Environmental Policy at Washington, D.C.’s Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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A 2000 study by the London-based environmental group Friends of the Earth found that collecting yard waste for recycling (ie, making mulch) emitted 264 more pounds of CO2 than burying it in a landfill. In 2002, two of Sweden’s leading environmental authorities argued that recycling’s benefits were usually undone by the resources required to collect and process it.
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A study out of Washington’s Gonzaga University calculated that all the garbage produced by Americans over the next 1,000 years would fit into a landfill just 44 miles square and 100 feet deep—less than one-tenth of one-percent of American real estate.
My students tell me that the stuff they hear in my Economics and Current Policy Issues course is ... somewhat different from what they hear in their management or accounting courses. I enjoy providing diversity.
