The Sacred Religion Of Recycling
So much mythology.

Robert Wilbin sets the record straight at Medium, with "What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong."

A few excerpts:

•We aren't anywhere near running out of space for landfill.

The Earth is huge and we are good at digging deep holes. Space will never be a meaningful constraint. (Source: a)
Properly run landfill doesn't hurt the environment in itself.

A badly run landfill site will let items blow away, or toxic fluids leach into the surrounding environment.

But a well run landfill site has a thick, puncture-resistant plastic lining, drainage for fluids, electricity generation from gases produced by decaying matter, active monitoring to avoid water contamination, and more.

Once it's full, it's covered over by a thick layer of soil, you can't even tell it was ever a landfill site, and people can farm on it.

•Really well run landfills are a very cheap way to dispose of our waste.

Improved regulatory standards have made landfill in rich countries much better over time, and we can keep working to make them safer and shut down irresponsible or incompetent operators.

•The main downside of sending something to landfill is we miss the chance to benefit from recycling it -- but recycling is only sometimes cheaper or better for the environment.

It depends on the item. Metals are hard to mine and easy to recycle, so they should never go to landfill. Plastics are cheap to make and often a pain to recycle -- you have to separate into many different categories, and clean them -- so it's sometimes best to just send them to landfill.

I don't just mean just from a cost point of view. Recycling can be worse for the environment too. By the time someone has picked up that plastic container of peanut butter, driven it to a recycling facility, separated it into its plastic type, taken off the lid, fully washed it out in hot water, and melted it down in a specialised facility, we might have used less energy and produced less pollution just to make a new one from scratch.

Because of these realities and widespread contamination -- lids on containers, food still inside them, or paper not being dry-- lots of materials that are collected for recycling are never actually recycled and have to be sent to landfill. This is increasingly the case as developing countries start refusing to use their low cost of labour to do the dirty work of figuring out what to do with our recycling.

•Reusable straws and bags are often more resource intensive than single-use ones.

Ever noticed that plastic bags and straws are both incredibly thin and incredibly cheap? Almost no resources go into making each one. It's really kind of amazing.

By contrast, reusable metal straws and canvas bags require something like 10-100x the energy and materials to manufacture, and need regular cleaning so they don't spread diseases. So unless you use them many times, they end up being worse for the environment. I lose them much faster than that, and have better things to do with my limited attention than remember to bring bags with me everywhere I go, so I just use those old-school plastic bags whenever I get the chance.

A downside of this approach is that, in the process of using lots of these thin plastic bags, you run the risk of not putting one in the bin and it ending up in a river where it goes on to hurt wildlife. But that's a rare occurrence in the countries I live, and you can just decide not to let that happen. My bags go in the bin 100% of the time!

•If we don't use materials in the first place, we save resources and don't have to worry about any of the above.

But we also don't benefit from using the wonderful things we make. Even seemingly trivial things can be important for some people. I don't use straws because I don't like them, but some disabled people can't drink at restaurants without them!

Fortunately humanity is figuring out how to get more and more value out of fewer physical materials very quickly indeed.

I try not to waste -- water, plastics, energy -- but I also feel good about using what I need. I print almost everything for my work -- including 75-page research papers. I'm a better reader (and highlighter) and thinker and writer when I do that.

The silly thinking is that this "kills" trees. As NYT columnist John Tierney pointed out a while back. trees are grown to make paper. Trees also add to the environment -- for the eye and for our air. That's why I mainly like to save paper to save money -- not trees.