I also found this observation by Howard Husock and John Tierney at Quillette about city recycling programs interesting:
When recycling programs became common three decades ago, they were sold to taxpayers as a win-win, financially and environmentally: Cities expected to reap budget savings through the sale of recyclable materials, and conscientious taxpayers expected to reduce ecological destruction. Instead, the painful reality for enthusiastic, dutiful recyclers is that most recycling programs don’t make much environmental sense. Often, they don’t make economic sense, either.
The chief buyers of American recyclable materials used to be Asian countries, chiefly China, where wages were low enough to justify labor-intensive recycling operations. But as part of Beijing’s “National Sword†policy, China began banning imports of “foreign trash†in 2017. Other Asian countries also began imposing their own restrictions. Meanwhile, reduced demand sent prices tumbling. The market price for mixed paper, for example, dropped from $160 to $3 per ton from March 2017 to March 2018.
As a result, cities that once collected some revenue for bales of recyclables (though typically not enough to cover the extra costs that recycling introduces into a municipal budget) must now pay to get rid of them. In many cases, they simply send them to landfills.
Here in Chicago we residents dutifully put our clean recyclables into blue cans like the ones pictured above and it’s picked up every two weeks by Waste Management who then takes it and puts the contents of six of ten blue cans into a landfill. Waste Management is paid a fee for collection and receives an additional fee for putting what they’ve collected into a WM-owned dump. It’s perfect. Unless, of course, you actually believe the hooey about protecting the environment in which case it’s a scandal and an outrage. How in the heck can such a situation have happened?
The answer, which many people proposing government-based solutions to problems frequently fail to understand, is that government programs have a natural lifecycle. Let’s say arguendo that the lifecycle begins with a need. The more cynical will have other suggestions about the beginning of the process.
Strategies for dealing with the need are proposed and it’s there that things almost immediately begin to go awry. The strategy must be advocated for, sold, and adopted and that very frequently requires some incentives which necessarily are accompanied by undesireable outcomes. Advocacy goes from True Believers to paid advocates to people getting a kickback of some form for specific solutions.
Over time circumstances change. The original need may have evaporated but the program will remain forever because someone, somewhere is making a living from it. Frequently programs transmogrify over time from filling actual needs to employing people at wages higher than they could realize otherwise. The strategy may have failed or become inefficient. In the 13 years since Chicago began its recycling program it has changed from a city-run and operated program to one contracted out to one that was not only contracted out at a cost to Chicago but one that failed to realize the initial objectives. That’s not a long time in the scheme of things.
I guess there’s more than one way of looking at that. One, the minarchist view, is that problems that can’t be solved within the private sector should, by and large, not be solved at all. Another view, one typically held by Democratic policymakers is that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Somehow the omelets never seem to materialize or are quite short-lived.
My view is somewhat different. Crafting effective policy is hard and there is no such thing as a masterstroke, a “one and done” by which a program may be put into place and left unchanged and unevaluated to run on its own. Programs should all have mandatory, relatively short expiration dates which require them to be reconsidered and retooled on a regular basis.
That’s hard work and outside the wheelhouse of most elected officials.
Heh. Government good intentions, eh? Can you say “masks?”
There is a regulatory issues buried in here. One cannot store post-consumer materials waiting for a market, that’s what the EPA considers speculative accumulation, which is treated as running an unlicensed landfilling operation. If WM is collecting trucks full of old plastic detergent bottles, it has a timeframe to move them or else its operating a hazardous waste landfill. And while obviously WM is in the landfilling business, the warehouses where it stores old plastics certainly do not meet the standards for hazardous waste landfills.
I only recycle newspapers and aluminum cans, because I’m pretty sure (though not 100%) that there is a market for them. If there is a market for some of the plastics, I doubt there is one for as much plastic waste is being produced.
Am I wrong? Isn’t burying newspaper and cardboard in the ground sequestering carbon?
How about plastics and used motor oil?
Reducing carbon emissions is not the only environmental goal.
‘Somehow the omelets never seem to materialize or are quite short-lived.’
No, they eat the omelettes and then claim that the eggshells they serve us are actually omelettes. And that you’re anti-environment for saying otherwise.
I read that article when it came out. Whether you like Tierney or not you can’t refute his facts. I didn’t realize that China had stopped importing trash in 2017. Several of our local recycling depots have closed and we now have to go twenty minutes to what’s now the nearest one. Once that closes we’re probably out of luck.
Sunset boards were supposed to trim and rein in agencies, yet, they seem to find a value to continuing things. For example, in my state Nursing Board used to come up for review annually saved by a quick booby flash from the agency’s lobbyist. Hiring a relative of a legislator is still an easy way to keep the agency on the payroll.
Recycling, a happy day was when a historic train depot stuffed to the eaves with paper awaiting a buyer for a few years, burned down to the ground. Local recycling believers soon disbanded.
We pay the extra $2/month for a full-size recycling bin which essentially gives us a second trash bin. We still follow the recycling bin directions, but I think everything but aluminum and steel now goes to the landfill. The waste management company isn’t forthcoming about what exactly gets recycled.
I discussed this with a relative back when China announced the trash import ban (I actually support it, one should be responsible for their own waste). He had a bit of business experience with recycling and he said it is possible to automate the labor intensive operations (the Swiss were working on it decades ago?!).
I had expected the price of recycling to go up to pay for the capital investment to do the automation…. but it seems the decision was made to send more things to the landfill. Sigh….
The key question in any recycling program is, Will anyone pay for the stuff? If the answer is no, don’t do it. The single best measure of the environmental impact of anything is its cost. If the cost exceeds the price paid, then the proposed activity should not be done.
Real recycling programs are self-financing and self-motivated. The best example is steel. Some 70% of total US steel production is recycled metal. Only 30% comes from coke/limestone/iron ore. The basic economics drive this.
Anything that loses money, like wind/solar, most likely has a net negative environmental impact.
Just about 65% of aluminum is recycled.
Programme drift- a wonderful topic with an unending supply of entertaining tales that leave you shaking your head, laughing or crying. I did programme evaluation for a few years and what I took away is that all levels within an organization were aware the programme was not doing what it was funded to do but they believed the ‘ new focus’ was for the better. The only people who lost out were the client groups
for whom the service was intended. One example- a residential treatment centre set up to provide care for a very specific ethnic/racial group. I found they had no one from that demographic in the programme! Reason- those people did not use the service enough and those that did were not cooperative- the new demographic were eager, cooperative and made real gains and to the service provider that meant they were now successful.