Bishop Hill The case against recycling
Jun 24, 2008 Recycling The author, Susan Hill, has a blog which I visit from time to time. She has just written a piece which touches on the subject of recycling.
I was in the process of launching into a major lecture on the evils of recycling in the comments, when I thought the better of it - it was becoming rather too long and possibly a bit of a rant. I've therefore put down my thoughts, such as they are, here.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, recycling is rubbish.
Firstly, there is no shortage of landfill space. We are quarrying a larger volume of stone each year than we produce of landfill. The reason we seem to have a shortage is that the EU has decreed that we should close most of our landfill down. Why they have done this is anyone's guess, but I imagine corruption has something to do with it. (I'm cynical like that.)
Secondly, packaging has very little to do with landfill anyway. According to Friends of the Earth, if you analyse landfill by type, packaging isn't even in the top ten. The biggest culprit is building waste.
Thirdly, packaging is your friend. If I recall correctly 40% of American rubbish is packaging. 40% of Mexican rubbish is food that's gone off because it wasn't adequately packaged - similar conclusions are reached here. The real waste of precious resources is throwing away food, not packaging, most of which is plastic - a by-product of the oil refining industry that would have to be burnt if it wasn't used. Put it another way: why do the rapacious capitalists who run the supermarkets spend all that money wrapping up cucumbers (which annoys their customers) if there isn't some benefit to them? The answer turns out to be very simple: it keeps fungal spores off the cucumber and so doubles the shelf-life. That's saving resources, that is.
Fourthly, recycling is a tremendous waste of resources, on the whole. We know this, because it requires subsidies to get anyone to recycle most materials. Commercial businesses will not produce, say, recycled paper without subsidy, because all the resources required to bleach and reprocess it outweigh the value of the end product. There are exceptions, like aluminium and some other waste metals. We have a long-standing, subsidy-free recycling industry (called scrapyards) for these things.
Lastly, a modern landfill is a rather marvellous thing. It is lined with clay and plastic liners so there is no leaching of pollution into the water table. Any leachate is collected and metals can be extracted from it. The methane given off is collected too and can be used as a fuel. (Source).This is real, commercially viable recycling, as opposed to the woolly tree-hugging, spend-and-be-damned type that ruins the environment and impoverishes us all.
If you have a dull afternoon, try looking on the internet for scientific evidence to support the concept of recycling. There is nearly nothing, and what little there is appears to be outdated and conceptually flawed.
/rant
Reader Comments (18)
Quarries aren't just holes in the ground that you can tip stuff into and if possible most owners would prefer to sell used quarries for housing pretty obviously. Fair more profitable.
As you point out landfill technology is pretty good, but it also needs to be 'actively managed' which costs money.
Most importantly landfill sites for ex-quarries aren't popular at all and require planning permission which may not get through, for e.g:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/5274302.stm
http://www.ellesmereportstandard.co.uk/12020/VIDEO-Flintshire-landfill-protesters-.3792353.jp
Unless you think the new planning permission quango is a good idea?
Saying that the active management of landfill costs money doesn't advance your case. The question is whether it costs more than recycling. Unfortunately the whole issue is entangled in a web of tax and subsidy, so we can't know for sure. However it seems unlikely that a process of monitoring a landfill would be more expensive than one of sorting the rubbish and then reprocessing.
Landfill is unpopular, but so is recycling - multiple bins, rubbish sitting around rotting for weeks at a time.
Do people really build homes in spent quarries?
Also, modern landfills do not collect all of the methane produced (current UK estimates are that they manage around an 85% gas capture rate). Given that methane is considered to be a potent greenhouse gas, it is therefore rational to divert biodegradable waste from landfill (which is the main focus of the EU Landfill Directive). Landfill gas capture rates would have to rise to over 95% for them to become competitive with alternative treatment processes from a climate change perspective (assuming that you subscribe to the AGW theory).
The landfill space needed for all of the US for the next 100 years.
I've heard the figure of 85% elsewhere, so that sounds about right. The problem with what you are saying is that you are specifying "from a climate change perspective". Of course, this is only one of the costs and/or benefits in the equation. This is why we got biofuels so wrong - only looking at partial costings rather than the full one, which is what is captured in the price (externalities apart).
Energy to process. Aluminium is one of the few items worth recycling, because it costs so much energy to make. No, scrapyards to not recycle aluminium cans, because you need better (and possibly subsidised) infrastructure to collect all the cans.
Best to concentrate on a few environmentally and energetically worthwhile options, than say "recycling is rubbish".
Having said that, yes, biofuels are a complete waste of time.
I do mention aluminium as being an exception. The energy part of the argument all falls within "is it economic or not?"
Hence the comment 'not just holes in the ground'.
There is also a alightly sadder history in that lots of homes have been built over the years on less than nice ex-mining land before plasticised concrete was available to fixate the contaminates.
In a previous life I worked in the thrilling area of 'contaminated land'.
That aside the argument is simple, you can't say that excavated land equals land fill capacity. It just doesn't happen. You are competing with property demands and local objections.
It seems clear to me that if you can make a profit at it (without subsidy) then it's worthwhile doing. If not, it's not. But what about when the resources run out? If they do and we need them badly enough, we'll find ways to extract them back out of the landfills.
One I've never understood is recycling glass. It surely takes more energy and human effort to collect it, clean it, melt it down and make than make new glass. And doesn't it come from sand? There's a shortage of sand? (And by all accounts, recycled glass is sub-standard and not very useful.)
That's why I don't use bottle banks.
Yes, I saw that you mention it as an exception. But surely in the context of environmental friendliness, "is it economic" is not enough of a question. Unless you mean in the broad sense of "energy economy"?
The full economic cost will include energy, land use, labour costs and so on. If you do "environmentally friendly" properly, you add on to these any externalities. The mistake environmentalists always make is to compare only the the externalities, and to leave all the economic costs out of the equation. As an example, this is why we have ended up chopping down rainforests to produce biofuels - the decision to grow biofuel was made purely on the basis of an alleged difference in carbon footprint which is essentially just an externality - the (again, alleged) cost of carbon usage on future generations. The other impacts (loss of rainforest for example) were left out.
wow i never seen it put that way before, you make some really good points
i agree some very valid points and fresh look at recycling, however it looks as thou it set to take over the world as the thing to do now a days
Only a sustained and conscious recycling effort by all concerned can help save the environment.