"Waste per person in New York City at the beginning of this century (excluding ash) was greater than the national average today."

Years ago I read a truly fascinating piece on New York City's municipal waste program in the early 20th Century. At that point, apparently, NYC recycled practically everything, right down to waste oils compressed from food waste - as well as the foodwaste itself. Unfortunately, the market for their recycled goods collapsed after WWI and the program was discontinued as uneconomical (odd - one would think that, given the huge amount of resources of all types required to support a major war, WWI would have increased the demand for NYC's garbage, not reduced it."

"even without including the cost to consumers of separating various kinds of materials (a cost that can be very high to an individual whose time has a high market or personal value."

Oh, come on. I sort out my recyclables on a religiously-conscientious basis, so that our household recyclables are generally two to three times the volume of our garbage -- and the time required to do so is frankly insignificant. Complaining about the time and effort required to sort your recyclables just reflects laziness. Quit whining.

"in 1988, Barberton, Ohio received $30 per ton for its waste paper, but by 1989, the town had to pay $10 per ton to the recycler. Hence Barberton shut down its recycling program and sold off its equipment."

It may well be that recycling certain types of goods is not economically viable at all times. However, it seems to me that there are at least some materials sufficiently valuable that they should always be economically viable for recycling - aluminum cans, for example. When I worked at an aluminum diecasting plant in Michigan, we paid 90 cents per pound for aluminum ingots; I heard in a recent media report that prior to the recent economic down turn, aluminum cans sold as scrap for 80 cents per pound, and that even now, with the downturn, they sell for 40 cents per pound. That seems like a pretty fair return. It would also seem to me that municipal recyclers overlook other (potentially lucrative?) recycling opportunties, such as scrap metals other than alumnimum, or consumer electronics, from which metals of various types can be extracted.

Tierney's 1996 piece "Recycling is Garbage" in the Times is a must read:
http://www.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/garbage.html

Penn + Teller's showtime show BULLSHIT did Recycling in their first season, I think. It's hysterical. One of the things they did was interview the Govt Hack who caused the "We're running out of landfill space!!!" scare and got him to admit that well, ummm, errrr, we're really not running out of landfill space. Gee, thanks for clearing that up.

I bought the DVD and it's fun to watch people's reactions to it after a lifetime of being brainwashed about recycling.

I, too, own that season of Penn & Teller, and the recycling episode is fabulous. I was previously one of the brainwashed, well-intentioned masses. The only recycling they confirm is economically and environmentally positive is aluminum, which, as Dennis concluded, gives a decent return. Much of the other recyclables are actually worse for the environment when recycled, because of the air pollution caused by the machinery that recycles these items - particularly plastics.

...students might be learning something useful about the interplay of economics and ecology, but I fear they and their teacher have missed the lesson.

We don't teach economics (true economics) in the public schools. Students graduate not knowing about the interplay of interest rates and bond prices, how the stock market works (it's not "just like gambling or playing the lottery"), or any of the other myriad underpinnings of capitalism.

They don't even learn personal economics like balancing a checkbook or the importance of personal savings.

No wonder, when they graduate they're easy prey for economic and environmental fear mongers.

"We don't teach economics (true economics) in the public schools."

I'd LOVE to be a high school econ teacher. But alas, at best it would be a two day/week class. You'd get maybe a total of 40 students signed up. That means that if a school offered it at all, you'd be paid like two cents. (But maybe it might be a good way to enrich my life? Helping high school kids understand how money actually works in a macro sense would be fun for me and make them much smarter people.

My science education was excellent in middle school was excellent. I especially loved getting a beaker full of a mysterious substance and having to boil off the liquid and weigh the remaining solid and stuff to figure out what it was! Also learned a lot in geology, oceanography, chemistry, etc. All my younger cousins are in the same boat. I don't know any one who has a shitty science curriculum.

Most religions teach that life is a fall from grace. If you work hard, come to all of the meetings, give us your charity, and pray every day, you may be able to overcome your sin.

Recycling teaches that your life produces a stream of waste that is harming the earth. If you work hard, come to all of the meetings, give us your taxes, and regret the impact of your life every day, you may be able to show your sorrow for the damage you are doing.

>

I forget the exact figure but Gas collected from decaying materials at modern landfills generate something like 3 times the energy of all the Wind + Solar projects in the US combined.

Don't recycle. Just throw that crap in the trash.

Recycling gets way more attention that it should. Maybe these kids could put their efforts towards the first R (Reduce) and there wouldn't be so much to recycle. They could, perhaps,focus on ways to encourage manufacturers to minimize packaging.

Amy,

This has nothing to do with recycling etc. But my science teacher in junior high told the whole class that evolution might not be true because they found a footprint of a human inside the footprint of a dinosaur.

And to kick it off my highschool biology teacher said "I dont believe that human beings evolved"

Thank you CA education system!

Oh and my economy teacher was the highschool football coach.

And I went to a pretty afluent school.

I agree on the "reduce" theme. That seems like a pretty useful path right now. Another thing to remember is that while in some cases recycling may be uneconomical (or downright counterproductive), it might not always be that way. For example, I wonder what kind of research is being done in producing cleaner, more cost-effective plastic recycling technology (there are probably trade magazines on-line covering the subject). Something to watch for, anyway.

On the other hand, some folks won't be satisfied by that. As Andrew Garland comments suggest, an effective, profitable recycling technology isn't enough. Environmentalism for some folks is a religion. You must sacrifice. Now. Heaven forbid you should make a buck helping Mother Earth.

You know what pisses me off about recycling? The CA redemtion value. Just try getting that nickel back after you chug the soda. Nope, you get a price per pound from a recycling center. Unless you put it out by the curb, which you may as well because the less money the city recylcing program makes, the more your property tax bill (or however you pay your garbage bill) goes up. Either way you pay another tax.

Balancing checkbooks - Psshaw, we have websites for that now. 'personal savings'??? - OH you mean 'available credit'

And I went to a pretty afluent [sic] school.

You went to a pretty effluent school.

"You went to a pretty effluent school."

Oh, I like that one.

Thanks, Gog.

Aluminum cans are already pretty well taken care of. You'd be surprised at how many people are going through dumpsters and garbage dumps to reclaim them. In our office, if we leave any soft drink cans in our garbage cans, the custodial staff grabs them and takes them to recycling. When there's a market, the problem takes care of itself.

Plastics are a devil-in-the-details thing. Some plastics are easy to recycle. Some others have to be broken down chemically and reformed, which means it take more energy and more processing than making new plastic.

The one that hacks all the researchers off is glass. It ought to be easy to recycle, but it Just. Doesn't. Work. And lots of smart people have tried. If you want to make new bottles and jars out of it, first there's the color separation problem. But the killer is the fact that you have to melt it. That takes a hell of a lot of energy, and it's exactly the same as for making new glass. So after all that effort, you haven't saved anything. People have tried other uses that don't involve melting it, but nothing has worked out. The big hopeful one is using it as a concrete aggregate, but the fly in the ointment is that portland cement just doesn't stick to glass that well.

Dennis, when I lived in New Jersey in 1988, the effort to comply with the recycling program was definitely not trivial. They had dozens of rules and regulations that had to be complied with to a T, or else you got fined. Among the requirements were:

* Newspapers had to be tied into bundles of a specific size, with twine. Color advertising inserts were not accepted.
* Glass bottles had to be sorted by color, washed out, and (the big one) have their labels completely soaked and scraped off. Broken glass was not accepted.
* Each category of plastic had to be in a separate container. There were seven categories. Not all types had recycling symbols in those days; some you were supposed to recognize by appearance and how flexible it was.
* Tin food cans had to be separated into ferrous and non-ferrous types, washed, and have their labels removed, like the glass. Can tops had to be completely removed and put out separately. And they would not take lined cans. That posed a dilemma for homeowners; recycling would not take them, but it was illegal to put them into regular trash, and the township never explained what one was supposed to do with them. Quite a few got thrown out at the side of the road here and there.
* I never did quite figure out the rules for different kinds of batteries.
* Each category of stuff had a different day of the week when it was supposed to be put out. It was illegal to put something out on the wrong day. And they had trash cops who went around and checked.
* They would only take so much of each type from a given household per week. It was illegal to put out more than the allowed amount. This was a big problem with newspapers, because if you put out newspaper and then it rained before they picked it up, that was also illegal, so you couldn't put paper out if there was the slightest possibility of rain. A run of 2-3 weeks' bad luck with the weather, and you'd have newspapers piled up for months.
* Oh, and did I mention that if the truck didn't get around to your house on a particular day, too bad? You had to take it back inside and it counted against your ration for the next week. There was an underground network of trash-trading where friends who lived in different neighborhoods would put things in each other's trash if they had an overage. This was also illegal, but impossible to prove.

"I chose the period of a hundred years because that is ample time for scientists to develop ways of compacting and converting the wastes into smaller volumes and products of commercial value"

Why wait? There's a perfectly fine solution called incineration, after which the ash is processed to remove all the resuable metal bits. Modern incinerators are very clean, produce useful power, make metal-recycling easy and what's left at the end is much reduced in volume.

Recycling might not be economic this quarter, but that is with the US economy. Value time? Another ecological/economic goal/lesson: Tax waste, not work.

Amy, the next time you're in France, ask a French person about recycling and the economy. Seriously.

Our local trash company (well, the one I contract with, anyhow) just implemented what they call "single-stream" recycling. Put all recyclable shit in one big honkin bin, they come by with a truck with a hydraulic arm that dumps it in, and they sort it all out at their center.

If that means that the paper goods end up getting incinerated, that's on them to decide. I'm just paying them to get the shit out of my house. What they do with it is their business.