The Truth About Recycling

The Economist has a great article on the truth about recycling this month... I was always a fan of metal recycling and plastic, but was a lot more suspicious about paper and glass. It just never stuck me as an efficient enough process to justify a wide scale transportation process.

Apparently, the truth about recycling is that overall its worth the effort. I know that this may seem obvious, but for a long time there was a great deal of concern about whether it actually saved resources, or wasted energy on feel-good make-work projects. Why spend $3 a gallon on gas, toting around tons of dirty glass, when its so cheap to just make it from scratch? Especially in places where there is no market for recycled goods, what's the point in recycling?

Take England: they import a billion bottles of wine per year, but have no wine industry themselves. What could they possibly do with all that recycled green glass?

Despite glitches, overall recycling does much more good than harm. They based this on a highly rigorous lifecycle analysis by the Technical University of Denmark and the Danish Topic Centre on Waste. Some quotes:

Based on this study, WRAP calculated that Britain's recycling efforts reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by 10m-15m tonnes per year. That is equivalent to a 10% reduction in Britain's annual carbon-dioxide emissions from transport, or roughly equivalent to taking 3.5m cars off the roads. Similarly, America's Environmental Protection Agency estimates that recycling reduced the country's carbon emissions by 49m tonnes in 2005.

Recycling has many other benefits, too. It conserves natural resources... Recycling aluminium, for example, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass.

And newer technology makes it even easier to recycle then ever:

Originally kerbside programmes asked people to put paper, glass and cans into separate bins. But now the trend is toward co-mingled or “single stream” collection... But the switch can make people suspicious: if there is no longer any need to separate different materials, people may conclude that the waste is simply being buried or burned. In fact, the switch towards single-stream collection is being driven by new technologies that can identify and sort the various materials with little or no human intervention. Single-stream collection makes it more convenient for householders to recycle, and means that more materials are diverted from the waste stream.

That makes me feel a lot better about mingling my plastic, glass, and aluminum cans in the same bin...

The article also talks a bit about the take-back laws being enacted in the US and Japan for electronics. These force manufacturers to recycle items that are very expensive to make, but have a surprisingly short shelf life (like computers), and have previously been difficult to recycle.

It also paints a pretty rosy picture of the future of recycling. The main barrier is simply that most products were not made with recycling in mind. In some manufacturing industries, their margins are so low that its not economical to redesign their products to break down better. A carbon tax could kick the market into high gear... although new techniques from Wal-Mart, Toyota and Nike -- who have adopted a zero-waste target -- will also help significantly.

Overall, good news about recycling from the über capitalists at The Economist.