At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer explains why it makes little sense to push for higher and higher levels of recycling when the costs of recycling are greater than ordinary disposal:
Sustainability is about using resources in a way that can be reasonably maintained into the future. This is pretty much impossible to really model, but that is not necessary for a decision at the margin such as recycling in Washington DC.
When people say “sustainable” at the margin, they generally mean that fewer scarce resources are used, whether those resources be petroleum or landfill space.
Gosh, if only we had some sort of simple metric that summarized the value of the time and resources that go into a service like recycling or garbage disposal. Wait, we do! This metric is called “price”. Now, we could have a nice long conversation about pricing theory and whether or not prices always mirror costs. But in a free competitive market, most prices will be a good proxy for the relative scarcity (or projected scarcity) of resources. Now, I am going to assume the numbers for DC are correct and are worked out intelligently (ie the cost of recycling should be net of the value of materials recovered, and the cost of burning the trash should be net of the value of the electricity generated). Given this, recycling at $75 a ton HAS to be less “sustainable” than burning trash at $46 since it either consumes more resources or it consumes resources with a higher relative scarcity or both.
The problem with using a common-sense metric like actual real-world prices is that we’ve had two generations of westerners raised to “believe” in recycling the way their forebears used to believe in the Holy Ghost. It’s not a matter of economic efficiency, it’s a moral and quasi-religious belief inculcated from the time they first started kindergarten. Explaining that it’s worse for Mother Gaia to try to recycle 100% of the waste our society produces is — if you’ll pardon the expression — a waste of time, because they were never argued into believing the virtue of recycling, so you’ll never argue them out of it.
