Stolen shamelessly from a famous American article published in 1996.

The author, John Tierney, later said that he got more hate mail for that piece than anything else he or anybody ever wrote for the New York Times Magazine.

The article can be found here.

The article starts off with a scene of school kids gathering rubbish and shows the problem right from the start:

Miss Aponte finished emptying the last bag. “We’ve been learning about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle,” she said, and pointed at the pile.
      “How does all this make you feel?”
      “Baaaad,” the students moaned.
The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceeded the value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the environment, because the bags and gloves would occupy more space in a landfill than the two bottles.

He points out although recycling had already been a thing for two decades, with businesses profitably recycling millions of tons of newsprint, office paper, cardboard, aluminium and steel, it was TV news items in 1987 about a giant barge of Long Island garbage being towed around the USA that triggered a public response, pushed along by State and Federal governments: the EPA aimed at 10% pushing to 25% recycling in five years, but individual states often had a target of 50%, like New York and California, New Jersey (60%) and Rhode Island (70%).

I did laugh at his comment about the role of newspapers in this push: “It’s the first time that an industry has conducted a mass-media campaign informing customers that its own product is a menace to society.”

Back to the school classroom and the next lesson with one Joanne Dittersdorf, the director of environmental education for the Environmental Action Coalition, a NY nonprofit group:


      “Why can’t we keep throwing out garbage that way?” Dittersdorf asked.
      “It’ll keep piling up and we won’t have any place to put it.”
      “The earth would be called the Trash Can.”
      The garbage will soon, like, take over the whole world and, like, kill everybody.”

Yeah, it sounds like my childhood school classes on the same topics. But as Tierney goes on to demonstrate in detail, that’s just not true, although it’s summarised better in this interview with him in 2015 on the same topic:

In reporting the 1996 article I found that all the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing. And that tiny amount of land wouldn’t be lost forever, because landfills are typically covered with grass and converted to parkland, like the Freshkills Park being created on Staten Island. The United States Open tennis tournament is played on the site of an old landfill — and one that never had the linings and other environmental safeguards required today.

That latter is a more concise summary than the original:

  1. It’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill… The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish.
  2. The cost/benefit of recycling is hopeless: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach…If you wash plastic in water that was heated by coal-derived electricity, then the net effect of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere.
  3. Recycling Economics also doesn’t work for the materials produced. As a labor-intensive activity, recycling is an increasingly expensive way to produce materials that are less and less valuable.
  4. Recycling is a Religion. The recycling movement is floundering, and its survival depends on continual subsidies, sermons and policing. How can you build a sustainable city with a strategy that can’t even sustain itself?

And it’s that last one that really tells the tale. As Tierney says:

Just as the third graders believed that their litter run was helping the planet, Americans have embraced recycling as a transcendental experience, an act of moral redemption. We’re not just reusing our garbage; we’re performing a rite of atonement for the sin of excess. Recycling teaches the themes that previous generations of schoolchildren learned from that Puritan classic, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegory features a character not unlike the garbage barge that left Long Island: a man dressed in rags who flees the City of Destruction, desperate to find a place he can unload the “great burden upon his back.” Guided by the Evangelist, the pilgrim wanders the world trying to reach the Celestial City. His worst trial occurs in Vanity Fair, a village market founded by Beelzebub and inhabited by noblemen named Lord Luxurious and Sir Having Greedy. The market offers tempting wares, but the pilgrim bravely practices the first R-reduce-by shunning the products of the “merchandizers” and continuing on to the Celestial City.

And on that note, moving away from Tierney’s analysis for a minute, here’s Liberal Law Professor Ann Althouse with a brief aside on a related issue, saving energy at home by turning off the lights:

I grew up in the 50s and 60s, when it was the norm to have the lights on all over the house in the evening. We didn’t think about the pros and cons of leaving them on, but I imagine that we’d have thought it would deprive us of a feeling of coziness and optimism if the house were not lit up at night. From the outside, our house and our neighbors’ houses looked warm and happy and alive.

Then the environmentalist movement hit, the meaning of light changed, and I aligned myself morally. I formed the habit, back in the 1970s, of turning off lights as I exited any room and only keeping lights on in rooms that were occupied. I have maximized interior darkness for half a century. Is the climate advisor going to tell me my efforts are misdirected?

I do love that little segue from houses looking “warm and happy and alive“… to … “Then the environmentalist movement hit.” There’s a lot of that coming. Her question arises because of news item she found in the Washington Post:

“When you ask Americans how they save energy at home, ‘turn off the lights’ has been at the top of the list since the 1980s. But when it comes to actual savings, it doesn’t even crack the top 10. Like most conventional wisdom about how to reduce household energy and emissions, much of what we believe about our homes and appliances is wrong.”

Exactly the same religious myth involved with recycling.

One thing that Tierney does not address is something that has become painfully obvious more recently, especially since China started refusing to take our “recycling”; much of it’s not really recycled at all but simply sent to landfills, and worse, in non-Western nations, as this Bloomberg article about India revealed (complete with photos).

The idea was to only recycle paper because paper factories in India often rely on imported waste paper, which is cheaper than wood pulp (a different situation than what Tierney noted about US newspapers in 1995).

The problem is that all this paper comes bundled with tons of plastic:

But the bales are frequently contaminated with all kinds of plastic that consumers have tossed into their recycling bins, including the flimsy wrapping that holds water bottles together in a pack, soft food packaging and shipping envelopes
…
Kirkland-brand almonds from Costco, Nestlé’s Purina-brand dog food containers, the wrapping for Trader Joe’s mangoes. Most ubiquitous of all were Amazon.com shipping envelopes thrown out by US and Canadian consumers some 7,000 miles away. An up-close look at the piles also turned up countless examples of the three arrows that form the recycling logo, while some plastic packages had messages such as “Recycle Me” written across them.

One Indian businessman interviewed points out that the people who scavenge this plastic do use it – but he sends the unwanted plastic along with the imported waste paper to a cement factory more than 400 miles away, where it ends up incinerated for energy. The same stunt has been pulled with British “recycling” in Poland (another report used RFID devices to track it) and Turkey.

The incredible thing about this religion is that it’s being going for so long and is so embedded in the psyche of Western nations (“I aligned myself morally” – “most conventional wisdom“) that if somebody – let’s say Auckland mayor Wayne Brown – suggested ending recycling for all but metal and dumping the rest in a landfill, he’d probably be lynched.

So it looks like we’re stuck with the stupidity and the literal waste of recycling.