Why do we recycle? Is it that we have no other means for disposal of discarded items? No, we have plenty of environmentally sound and economical landfills and waste-to-energy incinerators that meet the criteria nicely. However, environmentalists generally are against landfills and waste-to-energy plants because they fear some adverse environmental consequence. Other arguments include that we are running out of land space for landfills, and of course the old saw, NIMBY, Not In My Backyard.
Environmental activists argue that plastics need to be recycled or banned because they are non-biodegradable, and are made from non-renewable resources. The non-biodegradability argument is that plastics will remain in a landfill forever. Actually, there is little that biodegrades in a modern landfill. We learned this when a Professor of Anthropology from the University of Arizona, who normally digs in ancient man’s discards, decided to dig in modern man’s garbage. He chose a 50 year old landfill and with his students began to dig down. They recorded the dates as they went. Since carbon fourteen would not measure dates within an accuracy of plus or minus 50 years, how did he record dates? Simple, he said, they just read the dates on newspapers that were found. Just as Claude Rains, playing Captin Louis Renault in Casablanca was shocked, shocked to discover that gambling was going on in Rick’s Café, we were all shocked, shocked to find that newspapers do not biodegrade in a landfill. Subsequently the professor reported finding kernels of corn on cobs and meat on chicken thighs.
The fact of the matter is that in modern landfills water is kept out by a combination of water proof liners placed on the bottom and walls of the landfill and then the garbage is covered with soil each day. The result is the microorganisms that could do the biodegrading cannot survive in such a water and oxygen free environment. The good news is that if we ever do run out of non-renewable valuable resources, such as aluminum, glass, steel, plastics and even paper, we will probably dig up the landfills to recover them.
While we are talking about the non-biodegradadability of plastics, it is worthwhile to note that the very microorganisms that can’t biodegrade plastics will mutate to biodegrade them when starved of their favorite easy-to-digest materials. And this technology has been employed to develop bugs that will biodegrade oil spills.
As regards the non-renewable resource argument, it needs also be mentioned that before petrochemical sources for making plastics were discovered, they were made from wood.
Now, as a basic principle, it is important to understand that, other than food waste, virtually any material can be recovered for reuse or made into another use. We have the technology to do this. Even food waste, lawn trimmings and tree limbs can be composted commercially to make humus for nurturing plants. But are the materials we throw out valuable enough to cover the full costs of recycling? Let’s see:
Item Derived From Cost To Value of
Recycle Recyclables
Gold Gold metal Medium Extremely high
Silver Silver metal Medium Very high
Aluminum Bauxite Very High High
Plastics Oil, Gas, Trees High Low
Paper Trees High Low
Glass Sand High Very Low
Steel Iron Ore Medium Low
Food, Etc. Vegatation Medium Zero
As can be seen, silver, gold and aluminum are quite valuable either because the base material is scarce or, as in the case for aluminum, the energy required to convert the raw material, bauxite, to metal is very high. With oil at $85 per barrel, certain complex plastics such as PET (polyethylene terephthalate) used in beverage bottles and food containers and polycarbonate used in CDs and bulletproof windows, will have sufficient value to offset the costs of collecting and cleaning the polymers for reuse. The rest of the recyclables are less valuable, and in poor economic times such as these, paper and ordinary plastics packaging may have little or no recycle market value at all. Therefore, recycling must be subsidized by taxes or fees added to garbage pick up fees. What is interesting to note, however, is that the value of paper and plastics as fuel is quite high. Thus, disposal via a waste-to energy makes economic sense even in these distressed economic times.
The questions then are these: (1) is recycling economic, (2) does it save valuable resources and (3) is it good for the environment? The short answers are that, in the case of some materials such as gold, silver and aluminum, it is economic and saves valuable resources, but recycling is not always favorable to the environment.
Recycling can only be economic if the costs to gather and recover the basic material do not exceed the price to be received for the recovered material. The costs associated with recycling include labor, materials, depreciation of equipment and energy. As a result the total cost of recycling reflects directly on the environmental impact. So, if the cost exceeds the market value of the recovered product, recycling that item is probably bad for the environment. This is a good “rule of thumb” to keep in mind.
To understand the economic and environmental impact of recycling, it is useful to trace the trash from our homes or businesses to the places of disposal. If it is to be shipped to a landfill or a waste-to-energy plant, your trash is picked up by a garbage truck at your home or business where, without any separation by you or the garbage man, it is hauled directly to the landfill or waste-to energy plant where it is dumped. The garbage truck then returns to pick up more garbage.
Recyclables, on the other hand, are picked up in a separate truck which uses about the same amount of fuel as the garbage truck. Some places have the driver separate one material from another at the curb. Usually the truck’s engine idles as this task is being completed which can take up to five to ten times that of tossing the garbage into a garbage truck. If the recyclables are not separated at the curb, the truck will then drive to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) where the commingled recyclable materials are dumped onto the floor and moved about via conveyer belts to where they are separated by workers or a machine and then prepared to shipment to an aluminum, steel, glass, paper, plastic producer for manufacturing into a new containers or other useful items.
Every step of the current recycle process consumes fossil-based energy from the diesel fuel for the pick up truck, through the propane fueled front-end loaders that move the garbage, to electric motor driven conveyer belts in the MRF to the diesel fuel of the truck that hauls the separated materials to the plants of the respective users of the recovered items. Consequently, it should be obvious that recycling will use more fossil-based fuel to do all the hauling to and separating at the MRF than just sending the items with ordinary trash to a landfill or waste-to-energy plant. Moreover, it may not be obvious, but with the exception of aluminum, the energy required to process the recycled material to a final product can be as high as the energy required to make the same product from virgin material. So, there is little if any savings to be had there either. If this is so, then the total amount of fossil-derived fuel to recycle is quite a bit more than that required to landfill or to incinerate it.
There is a way that recyclables commingled with the garbage could be processed less expensively. That way is to haul all the trash to a factory where the recyclables can be separated from the trash mechanically. The State of Delaware had such a facility in Newcastle County just south of Wilmington that could process 1000 tons of garbage per day collected from the Wilmington area. The trash was picked up via the normal garbage truck and shipped to the facility where the garbage truck was emptied upon the floor. From there machines would separate the recyclables from the trash. Metals were separated from the trash via magnets in the case of iron and steel, and by eddy currents in the case of aluminum and along with copper were sold. Paper and plastics were separated from the pile by air jets and then compacted into pellets where they were transported via a pipe to an adjacent plant where they became fuel for an electricity generating plant. The glass did not have to be separated by type because all of it was shipped across the Delaware River to New Jersey where an Owens Corning plant used it as a feedstock for the production of fiber glass for insulation. The remaining garbage and lawn trimmings, etc. were sent to four composters in the plant which were about 75 feet in diameter which had large paddles to stir the garbage until it was composted whereupon it was used as humus for the trees and gardens in the State.
This method was deemed economic, but it was it shut down. Why? Well, Owens Corning closed their New Jersey plant, and since it was uneconomic to separate the glasses by type, all the glass was landfilled. New environmental regulations placed upon the electricity plant next door were too expensive, so rather than make the investment required, the owners elected to close the facility and purchase electricity. Fortunately, Delaware was able to sell the pellets to Chester, Pennsylvania who used them as fuel for their waste-to-energy plant.
The coup-de-gras came when one day a State Senator drove past the plant and noted a foul odor, which of course was coming from the composting. As a consequence, the plant was required to place collectors over each of the four composters with a chimney high enough to have the fumes blow into New Jersey with the prevailing winds the cost was too high, so they closed the garbage processing plant permanently.
Since fossil-derived fuel is believed to be the cause of Global Warming, or excuse me, Climate Change, why would one want to undertake uneconomic recycling programs that require fossil fuel and harm the very environment to be saved?
The reason we are willing to be coerced into recycling, and virtually led like sheep to do it, must lie in our concern about our compulsive consumption and how we deal with the trash it creates. While we have no compunction about throwing away the skin of, say, a banana, we feel enormous guilt about throwing away the “skin” (read container) that contains our beverages and other materials. So, we must do something to atone for this sin. The tasks associated with recycling make us feel that we are doing the right thing. An alternate, and environmentally sound approach, would be for communities to provide a person from the clergy, who upon hearing our confessions, could absolve us of the sin of being a wasteful consumer.
It fascinates me that we have those in this country who want to remove the word God in the Pledge to Allegiance, will not permit a Crèche on public property and ban religious teaching in our public schools on the basis of the separation of Church and State, but have no compunction about promoting and even teaching the religion of environmentalism in our Public schools or passing legislation that requires us to worship at the recycle bin. If recycling is uneconomic, and very probably environmentally unsound, unconditional worship of recycling is tantamount to a religion.
In summary, I personally do not mind if we wish to recover recyclables here and now and are willing to pay the price for it, and I do not care where and how one worships. But I do mind that the environmental activists insist that we are saving the planet from the horrors of Global Warming, or excuse me again, Climate Change by recycling everything in the trash. Uneconomic Recycling, like Ethanol as a fuel for automobiles, is bad for the environment, Period!
P.S. the reason for capitalizing Global Warming and Climate Change is out of respect for the new god.
