Recycling Myths; L. W. Reed

Ideas and Consequences Recycling Myths I f there's a buzzword in the business of managingAmerica's solidwaste problem, surely it is "recycling." At times the term seems to have taken on an almost religious meaning, with the faithful assuming that "disposable" is bad and "recycling" is good by definition. There's nothing wrong with recycling when it's approached from a perspective of sound economics, good science, and volun tary cooperation. Too often, it's promoted as an end in itself without regard to whether it's worth the time and expense. Recently, a speaker on this subject told my local Rotary Club that we should all recycle more of the paper we use so America could save its trees. The implication was that we're using too much paper, that trees are endangered, and that our civic duty requires that we do more with less. As it turns out, most of the trees that are planted in America are planted with the intent of eventually harvesting them to make things like paper. This means that if we all used less paper, there would be fewer trees planted. Maybe some people ought to use less paper anyway (bureaucrats, for in stance), but no one should assume that the people who are in the business of growing and harvesting trees are goingto continue to do so even if we don't buy their products.

Lawrence W. Reed, economist and author, is President of The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market research and educational organization headquartered in Midland, Michi gan. by Lawrence Reed "We're running out of trees" is a fiction older than most of the trees alive today. The truth is that though the total area of forestland in the continental United States is about the same as it was 75 years ago--- 600 million acres-there are far more trees because of greater tree density per acre. Market-driven technological changes, such as the development of wood preser vatives, have led to more efficient use of forest resources. Market incentives have given private land owners good reason to replant nearly three million acres of trees every year. So when it comes to paper, recycle to your heart's content, but not because you think we'll run out of trees if you don't. A recycling mania has been sweeping the country for nearly a decade. More than 6,000 curbside programs are operated by local governments, serving at least 70 mil lion Americans. In a recent year, more than 140 recycling laws were passed in 38 states-mandating the activity or requiring taxpayers to pay for it, or both. All this has occurred at the same time that cost-cutting entrepreneurs are busy producing less and less packaging to contain more and more goods.

Without any edicts from politicians, plas tic milk jugs today contain 30 percent less plastic than they did just 20 years ago. The weight of aluminum cans declined by 36 percent between 1960and 1990.Experts like Lynn Scarlett of the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation point out that Ameri152 ca's solid waste problem is a public policy failure, not a market failure. Because of flat rate charges for municipal garbage pick-up and disposal, government policies in most areas subsidize those who throwaway large quantities of refuse at the expense of those who throwaway very little. Entrepreneurs know how to construct landfills now that pose absolutely no hazard to the environment, and anyone who has ever flown over almost any state knows there's plenty of land for this purpose, but naysaying regulators have almost closed down this efficient waste management op tion. The fact is that sometimes recycling makes sense and sometimes it doesn't. In the legislative rush to pass recycling man dates, state and local governments should pause to consider the science and the eco nomics of every proposition. Often, bad ideas are worse than none at all and can produce lasting damage ifthey are enshrined in law. Simply demanding that something be recycled can be disruptive of markets and it does not guarantee that recycling that makes either economic or environmental sense will even occur.

Many people believe that simply segre gating plastic containers, glass bottles, newspapers, and metal cans and then plac ing them in colorful boxes at curbside means that recycling has somehow taken place. Without ever questioning either the cost or the outcome of the process that starts at the curb, they assume that whatever happens must be both economically and environmen tally sound. Recycling, however, doesn't really hap pen unless all that plastic, glass, paper, and metal is turned into new, useful products that are actually in demand in the market place. Some of what we put at curbside actually ends up in a landfill or piled to the ceilingin warehouseswith no place to go. Recycling programs may make a lot of civic-minded citizens feel good, but the whole rationale is undermined to the extent they are nothing more than expensive, po litically motivated, and circuitous methods of old-fashioned garbage disposal.

153 Quite often, more energy and resources are spent than saved in the process of recycling. Municipal governments, because of the inherent shortcomings of public sec tor accounting and budget information, rou tinely underestimate the full costs of their recycling programs. One area where recycling plainly works is in the disposal of aluminum cans. Since the process requires 10 percent less energy than transforming bauxite into aluminum, it pays for producers to use recycled cans. Hence, a market has developed for these cans, and market incentives encourage entrepreneurs to find efficient ways to collect them. One area where recycling doesn't make sense is in the disposal of juice containers used principally by school children. Aseptic disposable packages such as those small juice boxes were banned in Maine and are a target of the more extreme environmental ists. But as a 1991 study from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas showed, such knee-jerk, interventionist, pseudo-solutions to nonproblems are rooted in misinformation or incomplete informa tion: • Filling disposable boxes requires about half as much energy as fillingthe supposedly preferable alternative, glass bottles.

• For a given beverage volume, trans porting empty glass bottles requires 15 times as many trucks as the empty boxes-thus using more fuel and causing more air pollu tion. • Because the end product is lightweight, small, and rectangular, the filled boxes can be transported more efficiently than full glass bottles-using 35 percent less energy. Some states have threatened to ban dis posable diapers as a way to encourage the use (and recycling) of cloth diapers. Studies show, however, that when all environmen tal effects are considered, cloth has no clear advantage over disposables.In California and other western states where there is relatively abundant landfill space and a shortage of water, the case for disposables is actually quite strong. Residents of those states who avoid them and wash cloth dia pers with scarce water may actually be 154 THE FREEMAN • MARCH 1995 doing harm to the environment. The mar ketplace, once again, is not as dumb as certain do-gooders think it is.

Several cities, including Portland, Ore gon, and Newark, New Jersey, have essen tially banned polystyrene food packages. That's what McDonald's used to put its burgers in until it was pressured into switch ing to paperboard containers. The average American thinks these efforts are positive for the environment because they will some how promote recycling. They also believe that because paper is "biodegradable" and polystyrene is not, the switch willreduce the need for landfills. The truth of the matter is more complicated than that. Polystyrene, it so happens, is completely recyclable, which isn't always true of the paper used in, say, drinking cups. And those paper cups, by the way, cost the consumer about 2V2 times as much as polystyrene. Studies from NCPA and other respected organizations show that production of the old polystyrene McDonald's hamburger shell actually used 30 percent less energy than paperboard and resulted in 46 percent less air pollution and 42 percent less water pollution. The average 10-gram paper cup consumes 33 grams of wood and uses 28 percent more petroleum in its manufacture than the entire input of a polystyrene cup.

Furthermore, the paper cup requires 36 times more chemical input (partly because it weighs seven times as much) and takes about 12 times as much steam, 36 times as much electricity and-twice as much cooling water to make, compared to its polystyrene counterpart. And, about 580 times as much waste water, 10 to 100 times the residual effluents of pollutants, and three times the air emission pollutants are produced in mak ing the paper cup. Environmentalists who put their faith in government, with hardly a scrap of evidence that suggests they should, seem oblivious to these realities. To them, mountains of refuse waiting to be recycled into things people don't want at a cost they would never freely pay is not a reason to abolish man datory recycling schemes. Instead, it gives them a reason to pass new laws that would force-feed the economy with recycled prod ucts. Market economists-by nature, philoso phy, and experience-are skeptical of schemes to supplant the free choices of consumers with the dictates of central plan ners. The recycling mania confirms their suspicions. 0 THEFREEMAN tDEAS ON LIBERTY 1994 Bound Volume S turdily sewn in a single volume with navy blue cloth cover and gold foil stamping, the twelve issues from January through December 1994 - 720 pages, fully indexed for handy reference to the latest literature of free dom. More than 100 feature articles on topics such as education, environment, government regulation and control, health care, individual rights, morality and ethics, private property, voluntary action, and international trade.

Reviews of more than three dozen books. $19.95 each Save! Special introductory price: $16.95, through March 15, 1995 Note: Freeman bound volumes for the years 1986 through 1993 are available at $16.95 each until March 15. (Regular price is $19.95 each.) THEFREEMAN IDEASON LIBERTY EcoKids: New Automatons on the Block by Jo Kwong T he other day my five-year-old twin girls asked me to.turn on the Saturday morn ing cartoons. As I switched on the televi sion, I recognized the characters from Ted Turner's Captain Planet and immediately pressed onward in the channel selection. One of my daughters recognized the show and cried, "But I want to watch that!" I explained that Captain Planet teaches chil dren things about the environment and hu man nature that simply are not true. Reflect ing on a phrase used in the show, she asked, "You mean, the power is not with us?" My heart sank as I realized I was finally expe riencing one of my worst nightmares: the brainwashing of my children through envi ronmental "education."