Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 10, 1995                   TAG: 9503130021
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LAWRENCE REED
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RECYCLING OFTEN ISN'T WORTH THE EFFORT

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 million 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, plastic 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 1960 and 1990. Experts like Lynn Scarlett of the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation consistently point out that America's solid-waste problem is a public-policy failure, not a market failure.

Because of flat-rate charges for municipal garbage pickup and disposal, government policies in most areas subsidize those who throw away large quantities of refuse at the expense of those who throw away very little.

Entrepreneurs now know how to construct landfills 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 option.

The fact is that sometimes recycling makes sense and sometimes it doesn't. In the legislative rush to pass recycling mandates, state and local governments should pause to consider the science and the economics of every proposition. Often, bad ideas are worse than none at all, and can produce lasting damage if they are enshrined in law. Simply demanding that something be recycled can be disruptive of markets, and is no guarantee recycling will even occur that makes either economic or environmental sense .

Many people believe that merely segregating plastic containers, glass bottles, newspapers and metal cans, and then placing 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 environmentally sound.

Recycling, however, doesn't really happen unless all that plastic, glass, paper and metal is turned into new, useful products that are actually in demand in the marketplace. Some of what we put at curbside actually ends up in a landfill or piled to the ceiling in warehouses with 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, politically motivated and circuitous methods of old-fashioned garbage disposal.

Quite often, more energy and resources are spent than saved in the process of recycling. Municipal governments, because of the inherent shortcomings of public-sector accounting and budget information, routinely 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 spontaneously developed for these cans, and market incentives encourage entrepreneurs to find efficient ways to collect them.

Environmentalists who put their faith in government, with hardly a scrap of evidence that suggests they should, seem oblivious to this reality. 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 mandatory recycling schemes. Instead, it gives them a reason to pass new laws that would force-feed the economy with recycled products.

There's nothing wrong with recycling when it's approached from a perspective of sound economics, good science and voluntary cooperation. Too often, it's promoted as an end in itself without regard to whether it's worth the time and expense.

Lawrence Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Mich. This is adapted from an article in the March issue of The Freeman magazine.