July/August 1997

Is recycling a waste?

"Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America," trumpets an influential New York Times Magazine article Recyclers say it's riddled with misinformation. What's the truth?

First you hear the crash of broken glass and smashing of metal and plastic followed by the sounds of a screaming crusher. Then the recycling truck moves on to the next house, where the cacophony is repeated. As you see the truck drive from house to house, you think, "I'm glad I recycle, but does it make a difference? Those trucks add more pollution to the environment. Is the benefit of my recycling really worth the costs? And do my glass and plastic bottles really get made into new bottles, or are they buried in a landfill?"

More people than ever are asking those questions, thanks to several articles appearing over the last five years.

"Recycling is garbage," blasted the headline from the New York Times Magazine article exactly one year ago. It was the biggest and latest attack on a habit that is growing in popularity and holiness. Times writer John Tierney scorned environmentalists for their misplaced zeal, using studies and experts to undercut any positive benefits of recycling.

"Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources," he wrote.

Tierney and the Times join a small but vocal and conservative minority that calls recycling not only inefficient and unproductive, but fraudulent and a waste of city, county and state budgets.

Where DOES all that stuff go?

In "the yard" at Eco-Cycle, in industrial east Boulder, Eric Lombardi, the executive director of this large operation, yells to visitors over the sounds of tractors, dumptrucks, conveyer belts and a lot of crashing metal and glass.

"We are one of the biggest outdoor facilities in the country," Lombardi bellows. "We're doing 150 tons of recycled materials per day, so we've learned to be very efficient. We've been around 21 years, and we were one of the first 10 curbside recycling programs in the U.S. There are now 7,500. "We're known nationwide."

As he walks the yard, chatting with gloved employees and volunteers who often wear ear plugs, he talks about the destinations of each material.

He sends five truck trailers of newspaper to Denver daily -- by far the biggest commodity they handle -- which ends up at paper mills in Washington, Oregon, California and even South Korea and the Philippines. He explains that U.S. waste paper is a highly sought prize, especially in Third World countries where locally produced paper is of notoriously low quality. High quality U.S. newsprint and office paper mixed in with their paper makes for superior new paper.

Cardboard, their second collectible, also can end up almost anywhere because of a strong worldwide market for it.

Glass bottles, after being separated by color, go either to Coors

Bottling for melting and rebirth as new bottles, or to Western Mobile, a concrete company which uses it as Flow-fill, a "utility trench backfill material," Lombardi explains. Broken glass and other material make up the fill that covers a utilities company's buried wires and pipes, which is then topped off with asphalt.

Different kinds of office paper make their way to a recycling paper mill in Washington, and aluminum goes to Reynolds Aluminum in Denver. Steel takes a truck to either Arizona or St. Louis, and plastic goes to Consumer Plastics Recycling in Denver. There, it's sorted and sent to a variety of U.S. companies for remanufacturing into non-food bottles, carpet, clothes or playground equipment and a growing list of other consumer, business and construction products.

How much do we recycle?

Currently, the national average for the recycling or diversion rate of the waste stream is 28 percent. Danamare Schmidt, recycling coordinator at Denver Recycles, has no estimates of the city's recycling rate. Only about half of the city of Denver is currently being served by curbside collection.

Lombardi says the latest Boulder County figures, from 1992, estimate a 16 percent county-wide recycling rate.

Kara Dinhoffer, recycling coordinator for the city of Boulder, says that for all its environmental consciousness, Boulder recycled 18 percent of its waste in 1996, less than the national average. However, when measured by participation rather than weight, residential recycling is 82 percent and commercial is 50 percent. Dinhoffer speculated that the lack of mandatory recycling, and low landfill fees (called "tipping fees"), are responsible for such low recycling rates.

She also said the overall rate for Colorado is 17 percent, which is just slightly above the Rocky Mountain regional rate.

Is it worth it?

So what's the real cost of recycling? And one rarely asked question: What's the real cost of garbage, or of not recycling?

The economics of recycling are disputed on both sides. Recycling opponents cite studies showing that it costs cities more money to recycle than not to, especially when curbside collection is added in.

But recyclers say it is cost-effective, and often cheaper than burying garbage in landfills that will eventually leak. They point out that we expect to pay, directly or through taxes, for someone to haul our garbage away and bury it. We don't expect it to pay for itself. Yet we do make that demand on recycling.

"The main cost of these programs comes from collecting materials," notes the Environmental Defense Fund's "Anti-recycling Myths Report," by Richard Denison and John Ruston, "which often initially requires new trucks and equipment that duplicate the function of already-purchased garbage trucks. The keys to lowering the costs of recycling are not only to pick up recyclable materials at the lowest cost possible, but also to take advantage of the reduced amount of garbage that needs to be collected to avoid duplication. Over time, as fewer garbage trucks need to be replaced due to increased recycling, garbage collection costs, and hence total system costs, decrease."

Brenda Platt of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Washington, D.C., points out that critics often leave out the bigger picture: "Studies have concluded that recycling costs less than traditional trash collection and disposal when communities achieve high levels of recycling. It is true that in some communities, recycling is expensive. But often that is because these communities are still recycling at very low rates and are treating recycling as an add-on to their traditional trash system, rather than as a replacement for it. Communities that maximize recycling save money by redesigning their collection schedules and/or trucks."

Environmental Defense Fund's Denison and Ruston also think recycling fares well when compared fairly: "We don't expect landfills or incinerators to pay for themselves, nor should we expect this of recycling. The real issue is how the costs that recycling adds to the system over the long term compare to those of alternative methods of waste management. Taking an accounting 'snap shot' of recycling costs early in the life of existing programs is misleading, because they grow more efficient over time. Current experience shows that well-run community recycling programs can be cost-competitive with disposal options, as are the vast majority of commercial recycling programs."

What about those landfills?

Another part of the debate is the "landfill crisis." Tierney, in the New York Times Magazine, and others have been saying the landfill crisis is false and as a result "the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage. There's no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative." The Times says new landfills are safe, and they create jobs in economically depressed rural areas where large private landfills are being built.

"There may be no scarcity of land for new landfills, but new landfills being built tend to be quite remote from population centers," argues Platt. "Long hauling is already costing some cities on the West and East Coasts between $40 and $70 per ton." In one of her studies, Platt found that "at least 22 states have less than 10 years of landfill capacity left. Southern states reportedly average five years of remaining capacity. New landfills may cost far more than existing ones."

Currently, tipping fees in the Rocky Mountain region are about $18 per ton -- the lowest in the country, thanks to available open space. In spite of that, Ecocycle's Lombardi says recycling is still cost-effective in Boulder. He adds that collection and processing costs for garbage hauling and recycling are about the same at the moment -- about $90 per ton -- even though the recyclable markets are pretty weak. When markets improve, Eco-Cycle does much better.

And while Tierney reports landfills are safe, critics say they're not. "One out of every five sites slated for cleanup under the nation's Superfund program for toxic waste sites is a former municipal solid waste landfill," according to EDF. Platt adds, "Even the best landfills will eventually leak, contaminating groundwater." And, "municipal landfill leachate (the liquid that drains from beneath a landfill) contains a host of conventional and toxic pollutants quite similar in composition and concentration to the leachate draining from hazardous waste landfills," says the EDF report. "In most modern landfills, but not in many older landfills still operating, systems are installed to collect some or all of this leachate. Even when it is successfully collected rather than escaping and potentially contaminating groundwater, however, leachate must be treated before it can be discharged -- a major expense and burden on already-encumbered municipal sewage treatment plants."

Glenn Mallory of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, says that seven or eight Colorado landfills are leaking, including one at Lowry Air Force Base.

Add to that EPA's findings that landfills also contribute to global warming, because of the methane that rotting organic material produces. "Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas," says Judy Wong, who heads EPA's Municipal Solid Waste program. "We are quite confident about the data we have that reducing and recycling solid waste has very clear climate change benefits."

Then there's the issue of jobs. Tierney cites a tiny Virginia town that hosts a huge landfill for New York garbage, exemplifying how the town's economic base and employment has considerably improved, thanks to trash.

Critics though, quickly point out that recycling does it better. "Just sorting collected recyclable materials sustains, on a per-ton basis, 10 times more jobs than landfilling," reports Platt. "However, it is making new products from the old that offers the largest economic pay-off. New recycling-based manufacturers employ even more people and at higher wages. Recycling-based paper mills and plastic product manufacturers, for instance, employ 60 times more workers than do landfills."

Tierney defends the increase in plastic packaging waste as a positive sign. "Plastic packaging and fast-food containers may seem wasteful, but they actually save resources and reduce trash." He argues that plastic is better because it takes less energy to make than paper, glass or aluminum, and weighs less.

But, "Landfills don't fill up by weight -- they fill up by volume," responds Jack DeBell, director of CU Recycling at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "Fast-food containers take up a lot of space." He and others argue the hidden environmental costs in many disposables: They use toxic materials and create water and air pollution in their manufacture and disposal. And they use non-renewable resources.

Recycling advocates also point out that critics never talk about the hidden subsidies of the raw materials industries, which make non-recyclable products more expensive both economically and environmentally.

Pollution and corporate welfare

Allen Hershkowitz, author of a recent Natural Resource Defense Council report, documents the environmental costs. "It is virtually beyond dispute that manufacturing products from recyclables instead of from virgin raw materials -- making, for instance, paper out of old newspapers instead of virgin timber -- causes less pollution and imposes fewer burdens on the earth's natural habitat and biodiversity.

"While modern paper recycling mills can be designed to operate without producing any hazardous air or water pollution and virtually no hazardous wastes, the virgin pulp and paper industry is one of the world's largest generators of toxic air pollutants, surface water pollution, sludge, and solid wastes." Even more specifically, he continues, "paper can be recycled even at very large mills using fewer than a dozen non-hazardous chemicals and bleaching solutions that contain, for example, 99.5 percent water and 0.5 percent hydrogen peroxide (a concentration more diluted than the peroxide in your medicine cabinet). Most virgin pulp and paper is made using literally hundreds of highly corrosive and hazardous chemicals, including chlorine."

Energy is another resource saved by recycling, he adds. "Numerous industry and government studies have repeatedly documented that the collection and use of secondary materials results in large energy savings over traditional production and disposal methods."

And then there's the governmental subsidies of raw materials, says the NRDC report. "The virgin-based forest products, mining, and energy industries have all been -- and remain -- beneficiaries of both direct and indirect subsidies and tax breaks. Some examples of these tax breaks and subsidies include below-cost timber sales from federal lands, U.S. Forest Service research donated to industry, write-offs for timber management and reforestation costs, and below-cost mining leases based on an 1872 law. And these subsidies do not include the many exemptions from environmental laws that the virgin-resources industries enjoy, allowing them to externalize costly burdens to the environment. Collectively, these tax breaks and subsidies, which first began in 1891, have for decades averaged several billion dollars per year and have helped finance the development of a U.S. manufacturing sector that relies overwhelmingly on virgin materials to the detriment of recycling." Other recycling activists add that the huge cost of building roads into public forests for timber cutting, paid for by federal government agencies, is another big direct subsidy.

Hershkowitz continues, "Commenting on just one year's worth of subsidies (1988), an EPA study concluded: 'We can be quite confident that the overwhelming bias of federal tax policies and program outlays favor extractive (virgin) industries and their beneficiaries over recycling markets . . . Federal subsidies of virgin paper production undoubtedly cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars and may reduce the incentives slightly to switch from virgin to recycling paper production.'"

Pollution and recycling

And what about the energy and pollution costs of curbside recycling? Is it worth it to have all those trucks picking up recyclables? Well, even the Times admits that overall, more energy is saved. EDF adds, "At the current national rate of about 26 percent, recycling saves enough energy to supply the needs of 9 million U.S. households." As recycling increases, so will those energy savings.

And as more landfills close down and relocate farther from urban areas, more pollution is generated with more distant trips. If more trash can be diverted to a local recycling operation, less pollution is created.