Quotulatiousness

April 3, 2015

Updating the old saying “where there’s muck, there’s money”

Filed under: Economics, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

According to this story in the Guardian, a typical city of one million people poops out $13 million in (potentially recoverable) precious metals every year:

Sewage sludge contains traces of gold, silver and platinum at levels that would be seen as commercially viable by traditional prospectors. “The gold we found was at the level of a minimal mineral deposit,” said Kathleen Smith, of the US Geological Survey.

Smith and her colleagues argue that extracting metals from waste could also help limit the release of harmful metals, such as lead, into the environment in fertilisers and reduce the amount of toxic sewage that has to be buried or burnt.

“If you can get rid of some of the nuisance metals that currently limit how much of these biosolids we can use on fields and forests, and at the same time recover valuable metals and other elements, that’s a win-win,” she said.

A previous study, by Arizona State University, estimated that a city of 1 million inhabitants flushed about $13m (£8.7m) worth of precious metals down toilets and sewer drains each year.

The task of sifting sewage for microscopic quantities of gold may sound grim, but it could have a variety of unexpected benefits over traditional gold mining. The use of powerful chemicals, called leachates, used by the industry to pull metals out of rock is controversial, because these chemicals can be devastating to ecosystems when they leak into the environment. In the controlled setting of a sewage plant, the chemicals could be used liberally without the ecological risks.

August 31, 2013

Enabling the “nudgers”

Filed under: Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Coyote Blog links to a Daily Mail article on the woman who wants to run your life (and Obama wants to help her):

I am a bit late on this, but like most libertarians I was horrified by this article in the Mail Online about Obama Administration efforts to nudge us all into “good” behavior. This is the person, Maya Shankar, who wants to substitute her decision-making priorities for your own […]

If the notion — that a 20-something person who has apparently never held a job in the productive economy is telling you she knows better what is good for you — is not absurd on its face, here are a few other reasons to distrust this plan.

  • Proponents first, second, and third argument for doing this kind of thing is that it is all based on “science”. But a lot of the so-called science is total crap. Medical literature is filled with false panics that are eventually retracted. And most social science findings are frankly garbage. If you have some behavior you want to nudge, and you give a university a nice grant, I can guarantee you that you can get a study supporting whatever behavior you want to foster or curtail. Just look at the number of public universities in corn-growing states that manage to find justifications for ethanol subsidies. Recycling is a great example, mentioned several times in the article. Research supports the sensibility of recycling aluminum and steel, but says that recycling glass and plastic and paper are either worthless or cost more in resources than they save. But nudgers never-the-less push for recycling of all this stuff. Nudging quickly starts looking more like religion than science.
  • The 300 million people in this country have 300 million different sets of priorities and personal circumstances. It is the worst hubris to think that one can make one decision that is correct for everyone. Name any supposedly short-sighted behavior — say, not getting health insurance when one is young — and I can name numerous circumstances where this is a perfectly valid choice and risk to take.

June 10, 2013

When recycling makes sense – and when it doesn’t

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:14

Michael Munger examines two of the most common myths about recycling:

Almost everything that’s said about recycling is wrong. At the very least, none of the conventional wisdom is completely true. Let me start with two of the most common claims, each quite false:

  1. Everything that can be recycled should be recycled. So that should be the goal of regulation: zero waste.
  2. If recycling made economic sense, the market system would take care of it. So no regulation is necessary, and in fact state action is harmful.

If either of those two claims were true, then the debate would be over. The truth is more complicated than almost anyone admits.

There are two general kinds of arguments in favor of recycling. The first is that “this stuff is too valuable to throw away!” In almost all cases, this argument is false, and when it is correct recycling will be voluntary; very little state action is necessary. The second is that recycling is cheaper than landfilling the waste. This argument may well be correct, but it is difficult to judge because officials need keep landfill prices artificially low to discourage illegal dumping and burning. Empirically, recycling is almost always substantially more expensive than disposing in the landfill.

Since we can’t use the price system, authorities resort to moralistic claims, trying to persuade people that recycling is just something that good citizens do. But if recycling is a moral imperative, and the goal is zero waste, not optimal waste, the result can be a net waste of the very resources that recycling was implemented to conserve. In what follows, I will illustrate the problems with each of the two central fallacies of mandatory and pure-market recycling, and then will turn to the problem of moral imperatives.

October 31, 2012

The economic problem with recycling is that it’s the inverse of retail value

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Tim Worstall at Forbes:

We all understand how pricing in the retail chain goes. Each unit of something in a shipload of them is worth less than each unit when there’s only a container of them, and so it goes on. As we get closer to the retail point each unit rises in value. As we break down the shipment from tens of thousands of units, to a truckload, then a pallet load, finally to the one single item sitting on the store shelf. If you agree to purchase 5,000 iPads you’ll expect to pay less for each one than if you tried to buy just one.

We get that: the thing about recycling is that pricing works entirely the other way around. To a reasonable approximation the value of one unit of anything for recycling is worth nothing. The value of each of 1,000 units in the same place is higher than that solitary one. One scrap car in the middle of a field isn’t worth much if anything. 1,000 cars in a scrap yard might be worth $300 a tonne for the steel content (don’t take these numbers too seriously by the way, they’re examples only). Precious metals refining, scrap metal, recycling: they all share this same economic point. The more of something you have then the more each unit of that something is worth.

[. . .]

… the way we tend to look at the economics of recycling. We hear a great deal about how recycling plastics, or cooking oil, metals, electronics, you name it we hear the same thing, “saves resources”. Sometimes this is absolutely true. Other times however what we get shown is the value of the actual recycling being done. And we’re not told about the costs of collecting what is to be recycled. And as above it’s those costs of collection that are really the key to the whole enterprise.

Just as an example there’s value in 1,000 tonnes of used plastic bags. Among other things you can burn them in a power station and get some energy. Great: but what is the cost of collecting enough used plastic bags to make 1,000 tonnes? That’s the part that seems not to get into the calculations that our green friends present to us.

Cash4Gold seems to have gone under because the collection costs of the materials were higher than the value of recycling those materials. What’s really rather worrying about the larger recycling movement is that this can be/is often true of other materials. But because we don’t properly account for the collection costs we don’t see this as clearly as we do in the accounts of a (failed) for profit company (OK, would be for profit company).

October 7, 2012

Recycle, re-use, re- … oops.

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

The EU is being its traditional bureaucratic self again, this time in the home-made jams and jellies department:

It’s a fairly usual part of modern government to try to increase the rate at which people recycle used items. Sometimes it’s a very sensible practice indeed (we’ve been recycling gold for millennia precisely because it is so valuable) and sometimes it’s really rather silly (no trees are saved by paper recycling as we make paper from trees that we grow specifically to make paper). But more recycling is generally seen as a good thing. Which is what makes this latest piece of tomfoolery from the European Union so strange:

    But the thousands who regularly sell their home-made jam, marmalade or chutney in re-used jars may have to abandon their traditions after a warning that they are breaching European health and safety regulations.

    Legal advisers to Britain’s Churches have sent out a circular saying that while people can use jars for jam at home or to give to family and friends, they cannot sell them or even give them away as raffle prizes at a public event.

No, it’s not a spoof. It really is true that those tasked with running an entire continent, the bureaucrats in Brussels, think that putting home made jam (jelly to you perhaps) in used jam jars should be and is a crime. With serious penalties too:

    The agency said it was up to local authority environmental health officers to enforce the regulations, and penalties can reach a maximum of a £5,000 fine, six months’ imprisonment, or both.

June 1, 2011

When is plastic better for the environment than paper?

Filed under: Environment, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:29

The answer: when the product gets dumped in a landfill.

Stateside boffins say that, contrary to popular perception, it would often be better for the planet if people avoided using biodegradable products compliant with the recommended US government guidelines.

This is because biodegradable wastes — for instance cardboard cups, “eco friendly” disposable nappies, various kinds of shopping and rubbish bags etc — often wind up in landfill, where they will degrade and emit methane. Methane is, of course, a vastly more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, so it is seen as important to prevent it getting into the atmosphere.

[. . .]

The answer, according to Barlaz, is to get away from the idea that rapid decomposition is always a good idea — especially on things which won’t be recycled much but will probably wind up in landfill, for instance disposable nappies, fast-food packaging etc.

“If we want to maximize the environmental benefit of biodegradable products in landfills,” Barlaz says, “we need to both expand methane collection at landfills and design these products to degrade more slowly — in contrast to FTC guidance.”

December 29, 2010

Recycling: it’s not economics, it’s control

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Gregg Easterbrook points out the stupidities of many municipal recycling programs:

Freeze! Drop That Discarded Dishwasher or I’ll Shoot! The New York Times recently reported that unwanted appliances — old washing machines and so on — placed on the curb for disposal in New York City have been “disappearing.” With scrap metal prices strong, what the article calls “thieves” have been driving along streets scheduled for used-appliance pickups — in New York City, this happens by published schedule — and taking away the unwanted junk before the city’s officially approved recycler arrives. The “thieves” then sell the unwanted junk as scrap metal.

Set aside whether it’s theft to take an unwanted item that has been discarded in a public place. New York City bureaucrats think so; they’ve instructed police to ticket anyone engaged in recycling without government sanction. Twenty years ago, New York City bureaucrats were demanding that citizens recycle whether they wished to or not, and imposing fines for failure to comply. Now if the average person is caught recycling, it’s a police matter.

This issue is not the cleanliness of streets or the environmental benefits of recycling — it’s control of money. The New York City Sanitation Department pays a company called Sims Municipal Recycling about $65 million annually to pick up and recycle metal, glass and aluminum. Notice what’s happening here? Recycling is supposed to make economic sense. If it did, then the recycling company would be paying the city. Instead the city is paying the company. Montgomery County, Maryland, my home county, imposed recycling rules saying they made economic sense. Now the county charges homeowners $210 annually as a recycling tax. If recycling made economic sense, government would pay homeowners for the privilege of picking up their valuable materials. Instead New York City, Montgomery County and many other government bodies charge citizens for something they claim makes economic sense.

Recycling of aluminum makes good economic sense, given the energy cost of aluminum and the high quality of recycled aluminum. Depending on where you are in the country, recycling of newspapers may make sense. Recycling of steel and copper usually makes sense. But recycling of glass, most plastics and coated paper is a net waste of energy. Often the goal of government-imposed recycling program is to use lack of understanding of economics to reach into citizens’ pockets and forcibly extract money that bureaucrats can control.

Notice what else is happening here — New York City pays a company millions of dollars to do something “thieves” will do for free. The “thieves” harm no one, and could save New York City taxpayers considerable money. But then bureaucrats wouldn’t be in control. And surely no-show jobs and kickbacks have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with New York City sanitation contracts.

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress