Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 31, 1995 TAG: 9505310045
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LYNN SCARLETT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
On the one hand, champions of recycling claim it as a grand success: Recycling saves money and resources; all recycling is good and more is better. "Trash," they say, "is treasure." And, proponents argue, recycling is necessary in a context of unavailable disposal sites.
On the other hand are the counterclaims by recycling curmudgeons. Recycling, they declaim, is costly and a waste of time. Most trash is not treasure; and, in any event, recycling is unnecessary.
What is the verdict of these efforts? The answer requires casting aside the all-or-nothing, good-or-bad debate for a more nuanced response.
Despite claims of crisis in the early 1990s, we are not running out of landfill space. Tipping fees at disposal sites, reflecting fairly robust competition to supply disposal capacity, have stabilized or even dropped slightly in some areas, after a decade of steady increases. Recycling is not essential to preventing trash havoc.
Consider, then, the issue of costs, keeping two points in mind. First, recycling costs vary depending on location and program design. Second, costs are a moving target. Net recycling costs depend, in part, on revenues from the sale of all that treasured trash. In 1991, a typical ton of recyclables garnered around $40. Today, that same ton might bring in more than $100. This change makes a big difference to the bottom line. The problem is that, like pork bellies or corn, one can't count on prices always being high.
Given these caveats about time, place, and circumstance, what does recycling cost? A Reason Foundation Study showed costs in 1993 hovering somewhere between $100 and $150 per ton of goods collected. At these costs, the curmudgeons were right: For many cities (but not all), recycling did cost more than traditional collection and disposal.
With the current high prices garnered for recyclables, net costs have dropped in some areas to somewhere between $60 and $100 per ton. At this price tag, recycling is a competitive waste-handling option in many cities. Disposal fees average about $30 per ton nationwide; refuse collection costs hover around $60 per ton. This means collecting and burying a ton of trash costs about $90. Do the math, and we see that some recycling can now save money - for the time being anyway.
What about the second claim? Champions of recycling tell us we can recycle everything, "more is better," and "everything is best." Technically, just about everything is recyclable. But here the curmudgeons are right. The relevant questions are: at what cost and for what benefit?
At a "summit" meeting of recycling experts at Duke University last fall, participants concluded that, under the best of circumstances, it may be possible to recycle around 35 percent of municipal waste (this figure includes composting of yardwaste). Participants called this a "realistically optimistic" scenario that takes into account cost, problems of contamination of recyclables, and likely participation by citizens and businesses. Some communities will exceed this figure, but most will not without major changes in waste-handling infrastructure.
Why these limits to recycling? Many recycling efforts suffer from a "Humpty Dumpty" problem. Successful recycling requires collection of large amounts of uniform material from thousands of dispersed households and firms. For some stuff - bits of tissue paper, plastic meat wrappers, or multi-layered snack-chip bags - it's difficult and costly to separate out this waste into uniform, usable supplies of clean stuff that can be "put back together again" to make into new products.
Recycling champions chime in that costs don't matter. We are, after all, saving resources, reducing waste and preventing pollution. In particular circumstances, the champions are right: some recycling yields environmental (and economic) benefits.
Consider two examples, aluminum-can recycling and glass-bottle recycling. To make can sheeting out of used cans requires 95 percent less energy than to make aluminum from scratch. These energy savings translate into less air emissions. Adding some recycled glass (cullet) to the glass-making concoction reduces energy use - just how much depends on the particular glass furnace.
Though inspiring, these examples do not justify blanket assertions about the benefits of recycling. The devil, as the saying goes, is in the details - details that can only be evaluated by the folks in a particular plant making a particular product. At the plant site it is possible to evaluate the many constraints that affect optimal materials use and product performance.
An example demonstrates this point. High-performance paperboard, which meets specific requirements for strength and durability, often contains 15 percent recycled content. But raising that content to, say, 30 percent results in a loss of fiber strength. Maintaining these higher levels of recycled content requires adding as much as 20 percent more total fiber to meet strength requirements for the paperboard package.
No one-size-fits-all recycled-content law can hope to accommodate the infinite, devilish details that accompany all manufacturing processes. Yet failure to accommodate those details translates into wasted resources, higher energy consumption and more pollution.
Sometimes recycling actually impedes the process of doing more with less. Major innovations in bottle-making technology have allowed production of glass beer-bottles that weigh several ounces less than earlier bottles. This reduction in material means big resource savings when multiplied over millions of bottles.
What's the hitch? These streamlined bottles are more sensitive to any impurities that accompany use of recycled content. So, manufacturers have a choice: more recycled content in more material-intensive bottles vs. less recycled content in lightweighted, resource-saving bottles.
Decisions about materials usage involve a constant balancing act: How will choice of raw material affect energy use, toxics use, transportation costs, product quality, and overall costs? These trade-offs are continual, contextual and dynamic.
This balancing act is the stuff of marketplace decision-making in which competition propels a constant search to do more with less. Moving decisions about materials use into the political arena, with its relatively static and noncontextual rule-making, undermines this balancing act. The marketplace will not necessarily generate as much recycling as its champions might wish; it will, however, yield dynamic resource conservation.
Lynn Scarlett is vice president for research at the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation.
by CNB