New York City confidently predicted that it would save money by starting a mandatory recycling program in 1992, but it took so much extra labor to collect and process the recyclables that the city couldn’t recoup the costs from selling the materials. In fact, the recyclables often had so little value that the city had to pay still more money to get rid of them. The recycling program cost the city more than $500 million during its first seven years, and the losses have continued to mount. A new study by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute shows that eliminating the city’s recycling program and sending all its municipal trash to landfills could now save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually — enough money to increase the parks department’s budget by at least half.
Even those calculations underestimate the cost of recycling because they include only the direct outlays, chiefly the $686 per ton that the city spends to collect recyclables. But what about all the valuable time that New Yorkers spend sorting and rinsing their trash and delivering it to the recycling bin? For a New York Times Magazine article in 1996, I hired a Columbia University student to keep track of how much time he spent recycling cans and bottles and how much material he gathered in a week. Using those figures (eight minutes to gather four pounds), I calculated that if the city paid New Yorkers a typical janitor’s wage for their recycling labors, their labor would cost $792 per ton of recyclables — over $100 per ton more than what the city pays its sanitation workers to collect it.
As the economics of recycling worsened, cities in America and Europe found that the only viable markets for their recyclables were in poor countries, chiefly in China and other Asian nations, where processing recyclables was still profitable, thanks to lower wages and lower standards for worker safety and environmental quality. But as those countries have gotten wealthier, they’ve become reluctant to accept foreign trash. As bales of unwanted recyclables pile up in warehouses, towns have had to start sending them to landfills, and dozens of American municipalities have finally had the sense to cancel their recycling programs.
John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.
Update, 1 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
[…] THIS IS IMPORTANT: The terrible economics of (most) recycling efforts. […]
Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » THIS IS IMPORTANT: The terrible economics of (most) recycling efforts. — May 1, 2026 @ 04:00
When bulk recycling was confined to a relatively few smallish cities of progressive bent that had decided to go into competition with Boy Scout paper drives, such municipal recycling efforts often seemed to make more money than the cost of collecting and sorting the recyclables. Boy Scouts soon became unable to compete in the recyclables market and dropped paper drives as a way of earning needed funds to support local Boy Scout programs.
When behemoth cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, and soon the entire State of California jumped on the bandwagon in the belief that recycling could become a profit center for municipal waste collection, the market price for recyclables crashed. Progressives apparently believed the market price for recyclables was inelastic and demand was effectively infinite. Such people should take an basic course in economics and pass it. What happened? As anyone with a bit of economic study could easily predict, instead of paying to take cardboard, glass, and select plastics the processors of recyclables now insisted that they be paid to take the now-flood of recyclables away. This price crash happened before Red China and other East Asian nations shut their doors to American recyclables, er, curated garbage artisanally sorted.
The residents of large recycling metropolises and the entire State of California were sold a bill of goods. Residents were told by do-gooders that recycling would lower their trash collection bills but in reality recycling mandates have become a big bump upward for the cost of trash collection. This cost is usually passed on to residents of the aforementioned regions.
Rarely can such recycling mandate schemes be rolled back when they become money losers. Why? Because the existence of such schemes have given rise to — wait for it — special interest groups who make big bucks on the backs of foolish progressive schemes such as mandated municipal recycling.
Eternal vigilance remains the price of one’s liberties and the defense of one’s income and property. Skepticism helps too.
Comment by Micha Elyi — May 1, 2026 @ 05:48
After realizing all our recycling goes to the same landfill as the trash bin we started using it for trash overflow. Handy!
Comment by Bob the Builder — May 1, 2026 @ 06:14
Recycling has tremendous utility. It typically is taught beginning in pre-order and is an initiation into the “progressive” cult, and the groomers (I mean teachers) use it to induce small children to inform on their parents if the parents’ ritual performance is insufficiently devout; this helps transfer children’s loyalty from the family to the Party.
Comment by Peter Borregard — May 1, 2026 @ 06:50
20 years ago Penn & Teller were hosting a show called Bullsh!t. It explored a lot of topics, including recycling. The only thing worth recycling at the consumer level is aluminum. Aluminum can be recycled for 10% of the cost of creating new from ore. For everything else, recycling costs more than making new, and recycling actually has a larger environmental impact than making new.
What is needed around the country is more trash burning electric plants like in St. Petersburg, FL. When I lived there in 1988, you just threw everything out. It went to the plant, and got sorted. Some items (like metal) were sorted automatically, and others were sorted manually. Stuff that burned well (paper, plastics) was burned to produce electricity, reducing electric costs. The resulting ash took up 10% of the landfill volume that the original items would have taken. Also, when the plant was tested before going on line, they found that the exhaust air scrubbers were so good, the air coming out of the exhaust stacks was cleaner than air upwind of the plant; it was actually removing pollution from the ambient air.
Comment by yeah — May 1, 2026 @ 07:39
I used to take some time to sort my recyclables. I bundled discarded cardboard because the windiest days here in DFW seem to be trash days and I HATE litter. SO, bundling my cardboard, I set it out next to the recycle bin and watched as the lawn-mulch truck-guys grabbed it and tossed it into the mulch truck.
After some reading, I recycle the discarded metals; cans, excess steel, you name it because the city, according to some personnel, can sell the scrap metals. The glass, paper & plastic, are losers I was told.
Comment by BonHagar — May 1, 2026 @ 08:52
Nothing says saving the environment like having TWO giant diesel burning trucks rolling through the neighborhood every week instead of just one.
Comment by Stan Keepitz — May 1, 2026 @ 10:07
One big problem is convincing people they were fooled. My wife doesn’t care to know that recycling is a waste of time and money. Nothing will change her mind, but I LOVE sharing all the news that comes out about recycling going straight to the dump!
Comment by James — May 1, 2026 @ 12:54