By Brian Carnell

Monday, April 29, 2002

Newly-elected New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to shore up his city's bottom line by temporarily halting recycling in the city. Of course environmentalists are outraged, but the problem is with recycling, not Bloomberg.

Environmentalists sold curb-side recycling as a no-brainer that would be a win-win situation. Just throwing away valuable resources such as paper and glass harmed the environment, they claimed, plus it represented a wasted economic resource. Critics retorted that if the waste had any value there would already be a market for recycling and since there clearly was not, recycling was likely to be an expensive venture.

Of course being opposed to recycling means being opposed to everything decent and good, so mandatory recycling soon became commonplace. And the critics were right -- it was wasteful and expensive.

In New York City, for example, it costs $130 per ton to dispose of garbage. It costs $240 per town, however, to recycle glass, metal and plastic according to Bloomberg's office.

This doesn't make any sense at all if the environmentalists were correct. As Herbert Inhaber notes in a column for TechCentralStation.com, "If recycling is as cost-effective as its proponents claim, the city would have been making money on the program, rather than spending it."

Oddly enough, New York City seems to be a victim of advances in packaging that have reduced the amount of waste, while simultaneously making it difficult to recycle that waste. The NYC Department of Sanitation reports that 40 percent of the glass, metal and plastic waste it receives is not appropriate for recycling and ends up being disposed of in landfills -- and separating out those materials is an incredibly expensive task, largely due to New York City's high labor costs.

The result is that recycling of glass, plastic and metal is an enormous waste in New York City. Spending $240 to recycle materials that could be consigned to a landfill for $130 is a gross distortion of economic priorities that does far more harm to the environment than would simply disposing of those materials in a landfill.

Recycling can make economic sense. There are numerous examples where recycling is done not because it is mandated but because it is profitable to do so, and recycling of paper such as newsprint in New York City's program is not the huge money sucking vacuum that glass, plastic and metal are. If states and municipalities would stick to recycling materials where the cost of doing so is lower than disposing of them as garbage, recycling programs would make a lot more sense.

Sources:

No kidding on recycling. Herbert Inhaber, TechCentralStation.Com, April 22, 2002.

NYC Mayor wants to dump recycling. Associated Press, April 22, 2002.

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