The Recycling Myth
mises.org
mises.org
Of course they are external cost to recycle, what he doesn't say is that THEY ARE EXTERNAL COST TO NOT RECYCLING. Nature knows that since long long ago, she recycles everything.
The Pacific is filled with polymers just because people love to use plastics and don't recycle them, fishes dye (external cost) every day because they confuse it with jellyfish. Jellyfish plague the seas(external cost).
Plastics additives are getting to our food chain(external cost). Our water contaminated by flame retardants and biphenols A when you bury it are affecting us (external cost).
If you want to make new paper you need to contaminate the rivers (Think about International Paper corp.). Making aluminium from oxide, instead of melting takes an exorbitant quantity of energy(external cost).
This article is pure demagogy, if he want to be serious he needs to put numbers over the table.
My money is on the 'expiry' :)
Anyway, you make excellent points, and the article is spouting typical industry grade bs.
Resources are finite.
A guy called 'Eckart Wintzen' promoted a concept he called 'taxing resources removed', which essentially is the opposite of 'value added tax'. His idea was that you should pay taxes on those resources that you remove from the biosphere, and that products made from recycled goods ought to be tax free.
I think it was an excellent concept.
Recently I have created a methodology inspired by that experience at Origin: http://www.scribd.com/doc/5507536/Sustainable-Software-Engin...
More info about Eckart Wintzen (who passed away recently): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.11/es_wintzen_pr.html
'Eck's tent' :)
Fishes die everyday because they eat polymers and can't digest it, their stomachs fill and there is no space for food.
It's normal to discover dead sharks and whales with their stomachs filled or nearly filed.
The author of the article is concentrating on obvious costs felt independently by individuals, and ignoring diffuse non-economic benefits (such as... not accumulating huge piles of trash filled with difficult-to-recover resources). He's quite possibly correct anyway that it's a poor trade-off, or that it's at least poorly implemented, but he really isn't making a persuasive case, especially given the lack of any actual non-anecdotal evidence of what the costs and benefits are.
I guarantee you there are efficient and even profitable ways to recycle, but those not only don't require the use of force but will be made less efficient by its presence.
That being said... Why is this on HN? I would prefer to keep more political topics off of here. Mises.org has some really good technology and Intellectual Property right related articles, but people might be inclined to ignore the source if they're already inclined to believe that it will be off topic.
The article suggests that people have to sort their garbage themselves, but they could pay someone to do it for them. This is similar to carbon taxes philosophy, create an incentive by making consumers bear the cost of inefficiencies, then some company will find a way to improve things, this reducing those costs.
Either way, citizens will be forced to pay these new businesses to do this task, and most will probably still continue to do it themselves to save money. This recycling program is basically a massive tax on the populace, hidden under the guise of environmentalism. Not to mention it's probably much more difficult to start a business in Sweden than here in the states. I would imagine the Swedish government would take issue with companies profiting off of government programs. That, or there's some other red-tape involved, otherwise we'd already see these garbage sorting companies in existence (it's the first thing I thought of too when I was reading the article).
The author is probably right, but some concrete numbers would go a long way to supporting his argument.
I remember when I was a kid that factories were paying for old paper and old glass. A whole generation made their pocket money that way. If it was worth something back then I would expect it to be worth something today.
Also, there are numerous studies showing how much more efficient public transport is compared to people using their own cars. Now they make people drive waste bags around in their own cars. That has got to be a very bad idea.
If it's worth a 10 cent "sin tax" for me to chuck a Cola bottle away, the that's my choice. If somebody can sort my garbage (because they really need the money, or they have a high-tech robot that can sort trash really well, or whatever else), then they win as well.
I'd say that he's trying very hard to make a point, and exaggerates.
For people living in the suburbs, the nearest station can easily be a kilometer or so away, which might be further than you're willing to walk, carrying a week or two's worth of recyclable materials.
Like many other commenters below, I too reacted at the single-minded economical focus of the article, while still agreeing that the current recycling system is a bit ... annoying, heh.
There was recycling bins but no one used them. Carrying one bag (unrestrained) was tricky enough, adding 3 smaller ones was too much work.
The thing with recycling is it has to be convenient to be effective. Even if there is a small price to pay. And people will do it without even thinking about it. Previously it was only glass and cardboard. Then they added aluminum, plastic, and small appliances. It went from 3 bins to 5. Now there are two, one for recyclables and one for everything else. The center sorts it for us (us being my parents since I moved away).
That said, I read an article many years ago by the head of our environmental protection agency, and he rightfully pointed out the externalizing of the cost of sorting on the population, but most importantly he pointed out that recycling of some materials is completely negative, i.e. it is cheaper and uses less energy to create fresh material than recycle the old.
The materials that did make sense to recycle though was glass, newspaper and aluminium cans. By not recycling milk cartons or plastic containers, you're doing more for the environment than if you recycle them.
The lesson learned is of course that you should always have science to back up your viewpoint, only by making a lifecycle analysis can you find out if a certain activity really is good for the environment, or if it's only good for your conscience.
I am not discounting problems in Swedish recycling but the article was a bit over the top.
I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front. Central planning has never achieved an expected result? There was never a successful corporation? Nor a military operation? Really?
If you're going to be an ideological shill, at least try to hide it a bit better.
Contrast that with the highly centralized militaries of WW1 - the attempted result wasn't "get bogged down for 4 years while our troops are mass-slaughtered".
Coming up with examples where decentralization beat centralization, on the other hand, proves nothing.
Why is this? Most people, myself included, have at least a few "ridiculous biases" in their heads. I find it much easier to take an argument seriously when the biases are obvious. I may quickly decide that the argument is wrong, but at least I can make that decision.
Someone as far out into the ideological fringe as this article is going to be making a skewed argument no matter what. Would you really prefer that they did it in such a way that you never noticed the bias?
It's a matter of degree. Economics is a discipline which is all too susceptible to story-telling. Given a bias, almost any situation can be argued one way or the other by telling the appropriate story, and emphasising and underemphasising the various elements. So overt bias tends to lead me to suspect any given tale of economics likely has relatively little information and won't sound nearly as decisive if the sources are investigated. Making this decision to discount on the basis of evidence of bias is much cheaper than actually investigating the sources, of course; instead, I'll reserve such investigation for those stories which seem interesting but don't have obvious bias.
And in this case, the bias is extremely blatant and very silly. The author has stated right up front that there is only one way they could possibly tell the story they're going to tell, it can only end up one way, and they have no motivation to look for counterexamples.
In fact, the story may have some truth, may be a lot of truth, but the bias and the ease of manipulative storytelling in the discipline tell me that it's not worth my time investigating deeper. FWIW, I object to moralistic, almost religious, edicts to recycle. I'd much rather pay someone else to handle that problem. So I'm even on the side of the author's end goal; but I have no respect for the author's tale.
As the article mentions this is bad for the environment.
Garbage is already a big externality. A positive one. The government takes care of hauling away your trash and disposing of it, somewhere, and you get to benefit from the economies of scale of centralizing this.
The truly individualist, libertarian thing to do with your garbage is not to leave it on the curb for the government to pick up. It's to bury it in your backyard.
What's that you say? "Not in my back yard"?
I had a couple actual questions buried in the snark. Is it still legal to bury trash in your own back yard, on your own property, assuming you take the necessary precautions to prevent it from seeping into groundwater? And if so, would you - or the article's author - do so?
And if someone wanted to start a garbage collection corporation, using land they own, that they've lined so it doesn't leech into groundwater, and hauling away garbage with their own trucks, would the government stop them? I don't think so, but I dunno if it's ever been tried. I think that they'd quickly find out that skipping every other house on the block because they aren't a customer isn't very cost-effective, instead.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong to externalize costs back onto the population if they initially came from the population. It's like complaining about the free food your employer gives you, when there's nothing stopping you from getting your own food elsewhere. (I admit that I've been guilty of that on occasion, but at least I don't write articles - from a libertarian/anarchist POV - about how the government owes me convenient garbage disposal.)
I don't understand why. This is exactly how trash pickup in my area works: there are multiple companies and they only pickup for their own customers. To add insult to injury, I live in a very low-density rural county. Since these guys have been in business for years, I have to assume they're profitable!