peel.

Recycling is a key component of waste management and is beneficial because it reduces the strain on non-renewable energy sources and creates a way to reuse an old product as a new commodity. However, today’s issue of the New York Times reports a severe drop in the demand of recycled materials due to the poor state of the global economy. 

In the article, an employee of a recycling company calls the situation “Awful”, and I couldn’t agree more. Why? Because recycling is determined by tipping fees, which is essentially a landfill tax that offsets of cost of opening, maintining and closing a waste site. As tipping fees rise, people are less likely to recycle because they can send it to the landfill for less. As the recycling worker said, “Either it goes to landfill or it begins to cost us money.” 

In the recycling process, materials are typically collected, sorted, baled and sold to Pacific Rim countries where it is manufactured into new products. China is currently the largest export market for our junk and has kept prices for our scraps relatively higher than it would be otherwise. The article cites that on the west coast, prices for mixed paper scrap has plummeting from $105 to $20 in 3 months while prices for tin have also took a hit from $327 earlier this year to $5 currently.

Other challenges that face the industry include higher sorting costs, lacking infrastructure, technology constraints and the current market which makes it cheaper for producers to use virgin materials over recycled ones. As incentives for recycling start to disappear, our junk will continue to pile up in warehouses and landfills nationwide.

Now I’m not a green hero or anything, but what’s going on right now is quite troubling to me: recycling has been widely agreed to save energy and though we aren’t running out of trees and sand to make paper and glass, it seems as though we should keep recycling to minimize the space dedicated to landfils and scrap warehouses. But as Richard Porter points out in The Economics of Waste, we must decide whether the social benefits of state-governed recycling programs are worth the social cost. After all, recycling always means extra bins, extra sorting, extra space and extra time, which ultimately has no benefit for most households. Althoguh Gung-ho enthusiasm for recycling may work for awhile, eventually, it may wane.