As City Budgets Shrink, It’s Time to Rethink Recycling Programs
21st September 2020
The COVID recession has caused tax revenues to plummet, forcing cities and states to make painful budget cuts. But as they struggle to fund schools, parks, public safety, and other essential services, there’s one simple and painless way for governments to save money: Rethink recycling. The goal should be to transform the practice from a virtuous-seeming exercise that drains funds from core public services, to one by which price signals assure taxpayers that diverted materials are actually recycled.
When recycling programs became common three decades ago, they were sold to taxpayers as a win-win, financially and environmentally: Cities expected to reap budget savings through the sale of recyclable materials, and conscientious taxpayers expected to reduce ecological destruction. Instead, the painful reality for enthusiastic, dutiful recyclers is that most recycling programs don’t make much environmental sense. Often, they don’t make economic sense, either.
September 21st, 2020 at 09:15
Nobody – and I mean nobody – asks where all the “recycle” goes.
When there’s no market for something, it just goes in the landfill. But there’s one catch: You get to pay extra to have it picked up separately as recycle.
Milk jugs are the easiest example. No mother will buy milk in previously used milk jugs, so they can’t be rinsed and reused (like the glass ones of years ago). So what do you do with the polyethylene? They could be burned for electric generation in place of fuel oil. After all, they’re made from petroleum but are cleaner burning since there are no minerals, sulfur, or nitrogen compounds. Nope, can’t do that. Gov’t won’t let you. NY tried to recycle them by extruding the jugs into supports for park benches. Worked great until the parks were full of benches. Same thing happened with other states. They dutifully collect them, pile them up, compress them into bales, and dump them in the nearest landfill.