Few meals are as tasty as beef from a sacred cow.

For a few years now, my friends have heard me enthusiasticlly admit that I do not recycle. My rationale up to this point has been that there are three R’s — Reduce, Reuse and Recycle — and the general public pretends they never heard the first two because the third is so easy. Compared to throwing everything away, only a mild increase in effort is requird to recycle: we must sort.

But recycling alone:

1. Does not curb our consumption. (Perhaps, does it increase it, because we can consume guilt-free?);
2. Does not increase our frugality. (Do we really need two cars?); and
3. Does not increase our environmental efficiency. (Why use the same drink container for kids’ lunches when drink’n'boxes are recyclable?)

People do not recycle because they care about the environment. (How many SUVs have you seen dropping off at the town depot?) People recycle because it’s the easiest of the three R’s that still allows them to feel like they’re making a difference. And taking the easy way out has always been — and always will be — lame.

“Why should people get so upset… when [a recycling] program is cancelled? People rebel because the facts about recycling are so opposed to the entrenched worldview. Recycling makes us feel good. It salves our guilty conscience. It makes us feel pure again. When you take recycling away from us, you’re reminding us that believing a lie is not quite the same as understanding reality.”

— Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars, p. 76

Daniel Benjamin, a professor of economics at Clemson University, has published an interesting paper on the subject of recycling. The following list contains the “eight great myths” of recycling that he describes:

MYTH #1: Our garbage will bury us.

“Allen Geswein, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official, and one of the authors of the EPA study, remarked, ‘I’ve always wondered where that crap about a landfill-capacity crisis came from’ (Bailey 1995, A8).”

MYTH #2: Our garbage will poison us.

“The agency has concluded that land-fills constructed according to EPA regulations can be expected to cause 5.7 cancer-related deaths over the next 300 years—one every 50 years (EPA 1990, 1991; Goodstein 1995). To put this in perspective, cancer kills over 560,000 people every year in the United States, and celery, pears, and lettuce are all considerably more dangerous to humans than are modern landfills (Ames, Magaw, and Gold 1987; Gold, Ames, and Slone 2002).”

MYTH #3: Packaging is our problem.

“The average household in the United States generates less trash each year—fully one-third less—than does the average household in Mexico (Rathje and Murphy 1992, 216–19; Ackerman 1996). The reason is that our intensive use of packaging yields less waste and breakage and, on balance, less total rubbish.”

MYTH #4: We must achieve trash independence.

“Transporting rubbish across an arbitrary legal boundary (such as a state line) has no effect on the environmental impact of the disposal of that rubbish. And moving a ton of trash by truck is no more hazardous than moving a ton of any other commodity.”

MYTH #5: We squander irreplaceable resources when we don’t recycle.

“The amount of new growth that occurs each year in forests exceeds by a factor of twenty the amount of wood and paper that is consumed by the world each year (Lomborg 2001, 115). Perhaps partly as a result, temperate forests, most of which are in North America, Europe, and Russia, actually have expanded over the last 40 years.”

MYTH #6: Recycling always protects the environment.

“The EPA examined both virgin paper processing and recycled paper processing for toxic substances. Five toxic substances were found only in virgin processes, eight only in recycling processes, and twelve in both processes. Among these twelve, all but one were present in higher levels in the recycling processes… over the past twenty years, a large body of literature devoted to life-cycle analyses of products from their birth to death has repeatedly found that recycling can increase pollution as well as decrease it.”

MYTH #7: Recycling saves resources.

“Commercial and industrial recycling is a vibrant, profitable market that turns discards and scraps into marketable products. But collecting from consumers is far more costly, and it results in the collection of items that are far less valuable. Only disguised subsidies and accounting tricks can prevent the municipal systems from looking as bad as they are.”

MYTH #8: Without forced recycling mandates, there wouldn’t be recycling.

“Another force behind mandatory recycling is ignorance about the extent of recycling in the private sector. Private sector recycling is as old as trash itself. For as long as humans have been discarding rubbish, other humans have sifted through it for items of value. Indeed, contrary to what people say about prostitution, scavenging may well be the oldest profession.”

From Benjamin’s Conclusion

“Recycling is a long-practiced, productive, indeed essential, element of the market system. Informed, voluntary recycling conserves resources and raises our wealth, enabling us to achieve valued ends that would otherwise be impossible. In sharp contrast, however, mandatory recycling programs, in which people are directly or indirectly compelled to do what they know is not sensible, routinely make society worse off.”

Are the Eight Great Myths true? To be honest, I don’t know. But they do invite further investigation. The most tempting reason being that since recycling is the easiest of the three R’s to implement, it has become the most popular and is therefore suspect. It has required the least change in our lives and has been the least disruptive. Isn’t it unlikely that the best solution to our environmental problems was also the easiest?

More info:
You can read the full text of Daniel Benjamin’s essay here.

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