Packaging

[skittle]

Bought a new cordless phone for the house earlier this week as the other one had popped its clogs after a couple of years use.


Now when I get home I have to fight my way through several layers of packaging to get at what I want.

First is that hermatically sealed plastic cover that just about everything is in now. You cant rip it, tear it with your teeth the only option was to take my stanley knife to it. Great I thought I'll just rip it open and get to the phones.

Oh no, try ripping the stuff and its like the serated edge of a can. I cut my hand, blood all over the place.

Now why do they seal this stuff in these fecking plastic seals - they're a fecking danger. A complete waste of material, which I will soon have to pay for disposing of if the loony council brings in charging for disposal of more than one bag of rubbish.

On another note if you buy a kiddies toy it takes 30 minutes to untie all the bloody cords from cardbox boxes that it is attached too.

I am really fed up with this packaging malarky. Surely in todays world we should be resrving resources and reducing the unwanted bumf layered over the products we buy.

end of

Time for a plaster.....

[bugmeister]

Couldn't agree more, the amount of packaging around these days is farcical. Perhaps we should all start posting it back to the manufacturers to dispose of, judicial mention of Packaging waste regulations will probably stop them sending it back to you!!

On another note, very few people have a realistic idea of the cost of their waste removal. If the council were to charge households in the same way as commercial customers, you would see a household bill of around £3 per week. Currently your contribution within council tax is measured in pence.

I would guess that the majority of us agree in principal with recycling/re-using as much as possible. But when it comes down to actually doing it we take the easy option and chuck it in the bin. How many would change our ways if we suddenly started seeing a waste bill of a few hundred pounds a year which we could avoid if we made a little effort.

[alunr]

Unfortunately here is something that we lag behind the europeans in again!

Recycling is easy to do and at no cots to ourselves yet many people don't bother or do it half heartedly.

more info...

Packaging is ludicrous these days and the number of manuals! I bought a sony product the other week and it had seperate manuals for FIVE Languages.

Slowly the companies are being made responsible for their packaging and product - WEE directive and End of vehicle life etc

>> Edited by alunr on Thursday 10th April 09:37

[Size Nine Elm]

bugmeister said:I would guess that the majority of us agree in principal with recycling/re-using as much as possible. But when it comes down to actually doing it we take the easy option and chuck it in the bin. How many would change our ways if we suddenly started seeing a waste bill of a few hundred pounds a year which we could avoid if we made a little effort.

Not necessarily... see below...

Recycling Is Garbage

Rinsing out tuna cans and tying up newspapers may make you feel virtuous,
but recycling could be America's most wasteful activity.

-By John Tierney

AS THEY PUT ON PLASTIC GLOVES FOR THEIR first litter hunt, the third graders
knew what to expect. They knew their garbage. It was part of their science
curriculum at Bridges Elementary, a public school on West 17th Street in
Manhattan. They had learned the Three R's-Reduce, Reuse, Recycle-and
discussed how to stop their parents from using paper plates. For Earth Day
they had read a Scholastic science publication, "Inside the World of Trash."
For homework, they had kept garbage diaries and drawn color-coded charts of
their families' trash. So they were primed for the field experiment on this
May afternoon. "We have to help the earth," Natasha Newman explained as she
and her classmates dashed around the school collecting specimens. Their
science teacher, Linnette Aponte, mediated disputes-"I saw that gum wrapper
first!"-and supervised the subsequent analysis of data back in the
classroom. The students gathered around to watch her dump out their bags on
the floor.

"Do you see any pattern as I'm emptying it?" Miss Aponte asked.
"Yeah, it stinks."
"Everybody's chewing Winterfresh."
"A lot of paper napkins."
"It's disgusting."
They're throwing away a folder. That's a perfectly good folder!"
"It's only half a folder."
"Well, they could find the other half and attach them together."

Miss Aponte finished emptying the last bag. "We've been learning about the
need to reduce, reuse and recycle," she said, and pointed at the pile.

"How does all this make you feel?"
"Baaaad," the students moaned.

Miss Aponte separated out two bottles, the only items in the pile that could
be recycled. She asked what lesson the students had learned. The class
sentiment was summarized by Lily Finn, the student who had been so
determined to save the half folder: "People shouldn't throw away paper or
anything. They should recycle it: And they shouldn't eat candy in school
Lily's judgment about candy sounded reasonable, but the conclusion about
recycling seemed to be contradicted by the data on the floor. The pile of
garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a
dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this
recycling equipment obviously exceed value of the recyclable items
recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the
environment, because the bags and gloves would occupy more space in a
landfill than the two bottles. Without realizing it, the third graders had
beautifully reproduced the results of a grand national experiment begun in
1987-the year they were born, back when the Three R's had nothing to do with
garbage. That year a barge named the Mobro 4000 wandered thousands of miles
trying to unload its cargo of Long Islanders' trash, and its journey had a
strange effect on America. The citizens of the richest society in the
history of the planet suddenly became obsessed with personally handling
their own waste. Believing that there vas no more room in landfills,
Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions
were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes
makes sense-for some materials in some places at some times. But the
simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an
environrnentally safe landfill. And since there's no shortage of landfill
space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there's no reason to make
recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren't
good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few
groups-politicians, public relations consultants, environmental
organizations, waste-handling corporations-while diverting money from
genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most
wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of
human and natural resources.

The obvious temptation is to blame journalists, who did a remarkable job of
creating the garbage crisis, often at considerable expense to their own
employers. Newspaper and magazine publishers, whose products are a major
component of municipal landfills, nobly led the crusade against trash, and
they're paying for it now through regulations that force them to buy
recycled paper-a costly handicap in their struggle against electronic
rivals. It's the first time that an industry has conducted a mass-media
campaign informing customers that its own product is a menace to society.
But the press isn't solely responsible for recycling fervor; the public's
obsession wouldn't have lasted this long unless recycling met some emotional
need. Just as the third graders believed that their litter run was helping
the planet, Americans have embraced recycling as a transcendental
experience, an act of moral redemption. We're not just reusing our garbage;
we're performing a rite of atonement for the sin of excess. Recycling
teaches the themes that previous generations of schoolchildren learned from
that Puritan classic, "The Pilgrim's Progress." John Bunyan's 17th-century
allegory features a character not unlike the garbage barge that left Long
Island: a man dressed in rags who flees the City of Destruction, desperate
to find a place he can unload the "great burden upon his back." Guided by
the Evangelist, the pilgrim wanders the world trying to reach the Celestial
City. His worst trial occurs in Vanity Fair, a village market founded by
Beelzebub and inhabited by noblemen named Lord Luxurious and Sir Having
Greedy. The market offers tempting wares, but the pilgrim bravely practices
the first R-reduce-by shunning the products of the "merchandizers" and
continuing on to the Celestial City. Today's schoolchildren, though, might
be confused by one character encountered on Bunyan's road to salvation: a
man, the source of our word "muckraker," who is busy raking together a
compost pile. This recycler of household waste isn't presented as a role
model for the pilgrim. He's a symbol of moral blindness because, instead of
looking up to see the heavenly rewards awaiting him, he "could look no way
but downwards, with a muck-rake in his hand." In Bunyan's time, it would
have been hard to imagine that pilgrims would one day be taught to search
for salvation right down there in the muck.


The Day of Reckoning Foretold

All I 've been thinking about all week is garbage. I mean, I just can't stop
thinking about it.... I've just gotten real concerned over what's gonna
happen.... I started feeling this way ... when that barge was stranded.
" -Opening lines of the 1989 film "Sex, Lies and Videotape," spoken to a
psychiatrist by a woman whose real problems-sexual and marital
unhappiness-have nothing to do with municipal solid waste.

AT THE TIME AMERICANS BECAME RACKED WITH GARBAGE GUILT, businesses were
already recycling millions of tons of trash a year. They were
voluntarily-and profitably-recycling newsprint, office paper, cardboard,
aluminum and steel. But the barge's plight convinced everyone that voluntary
enterprise was not enough. As Newsweek noted, the Mobro's saga was "to the
trash crisis what the sinking of the Lusitania was to World War I." The
magazine's cover story, titled "Buried Alive," warned: 'With rare exceptions
during wartime, Americans have not been adept at making individual
sacrifices for the common good. That mentality will have to change.
Otherwise, the dumps will cover the country coast to coast and the trucks
will stop in everybody's backyard." Suddenly, just as central planning was
going out of fashion in eastern Europe, America devised a national five-year
plan for trash. The Environmental Protection Agency promulgated a "Waste
Hierarchy" that ranked trash disposal options: recycling at the top,
composting and waste-to-energy incinerators in the middle, landfills at the
bottom. The E.P.A.'s five-year goal, to recycle 25 percent of municipal
trash, was announced in a speech in early 1988 by J. Winston Porter, an
assistant administrator of the agency. Even as Porter was setting the goal,
he realized that it was presumptuous for a bureaucrat in Washington to tell
everyone in America what to do with their trash. "After all the publicity
about the barge," Porter recalls, "I sat down with some engineers in my
office to estimate how much municipal waste could be recycled. At that time,
about 10 percent was being recycled. We looked at the components of waste,
made a few quick calculations and figured that it was reasonable to reach a
level of 25 percent within five years. It wasn't a highly quantified thing.
Some of the staff didn't even want me to mention a figure. But I thought it
would be good to set a target, as long as it was strictly voluntary and
didn't involve a lot of regulations." Politicians across the country had
bigger ideas. State and city officials enacted laws mandating recycling and
setting arbitrary goals even higher than the E.P.A.'s. Most states set rigid
quotas, typically requiring that at least 40 percent of trash be recycled,
often even more-50 percent in New York and California, 60 percent in New
Jersey, 70 percent in Rhode Island. Industries were pressured to set their
own goals. Municipalities followed the Waste Hierarchy by building
waste-to-energy incinerators and starting thousands of curbside recycling
programs-all in the belief that it would be cheaper than landfilling. But
the incinerators turned out to be disastrously expensive, and the recycling
programs produced a glut of paper, glass and plastic that no one wanted to
buy. So recycling devotees hit on a new solution: if people aren't willing
to buy our precious garbage, we'll force them. The Federal Government and
dozens of states passed laws that required public agencies, newspapers and
other companies to purchase recycled materials. These regulations, along
with a wide variety of tax breaks and subsidies, have pushed the national
rate of recycling up to Porter's goal of 25 percent-an expensive
achievement, since the programs lose money. But that's still not enough.
Environmental groups are pressuring local governments to expand their
recycling programs to meet the goals set in law-goals that, according to the
official who helped start the whole movement, are impossible to reach.
"People in New York and other places are tilting at recycling windmills,"
says Porter, who left the E.P.A. in 1989 and is now president of a
consulting firm, the Waste Policy Center in Leesburg, Va. "There aren't many
more materials in garbage that are worth recycling." Porter has been
advising cities and states to abandon their unrealistic goals, but
politicians are terrified of coming out against recycling. How could they
explain to the voters? How could they explain it to their children?


The Evangelist's Alarms

AFTER THE LITTER HUNT IN MISS APONTE'S SCIENCE classroom, it was time for a
guest lecturer on garbage. A fifth-grade class was brought in to hear Joanne
Dittersdorf, the director of environmental education for the Environmental
Action Coalition, a nonprofit group based in New York. Her slide show began
with a 19th-century photograph of a street in New York strewn with garbage.

"Why can't we keep throwing out garbage that way?" Dittersdorf asked.
"It'll keep piling up and we won't have any place to put it."
"The earth would be called the Trash Can."
The garbage will soon, like, take over the whole world and, like, kill
everybody."
Dittersdorf asked the children to examine their lives. "Does anyone
here ever have takeout food?" A few students confessed, and Dittersdorf
gently scolded them. "A lot of garbage there."

She showed a slide illustrating New Yorkers' total annual production of
garbage: a pile big enough to fill 15 city blocks to a height of 20 stories.
'There are a lot of landfills in New York City," Dittersdorf said, "but
we've run out of space." Showing a slide of Flushing Meadows, a former
landfill that's now a park, she asked, "Would you want to live on top of one
of these landfills?" The place didn't look too bad, actually, but
Dittersdorf explained that toxic threats could be hidden in a landfill.
"Have you ever heard of a place called Love Canal? It was an old landfill
that belonged to a chemical company, and they sold it to build a school on,
and everyone who went to that school got very sick. There was poison in the
dirt underneath." A supermarket package of red apples appeared on the
screen. "Look at the plastic, the Styrofoam or cardboard underneath,"
Dittersdorf said. "Do you need this much wrapping when you buy things?"
"Noooo." Every week," Dittersdorf said, "75,000 trees are cut to make the
Sunday New York Times." The children were appalled. A few glanced
reproachfully at me sitting in the back of the room. I didn't try to justify
my-or your-role in this weekly tree-slaying, garbage-generating,
earth-defiling ritual. The children were in no mood for heresy. Dittersdorf
had masterfully reinforced the mythical tenets of the garbage crisis: We're
a wicked throwaway society. Plastic packaging and fast-food containers may
seem wasteful, but they actually save resources and reduce trash. The
typical household in Mexico City buys fewer packaged goods than an American
household, but it produces one third more garbage, chiefly because Mexicans
buy fresh foods in bulk and throw away large portions that are unused,
spoiled or stale. Those apples in Dittersdorf's slide, protected by plastic
wrap and foam, are less likely to spoil. The lightweight plastic packaging
requires much less energy to manufacture and transport than traditional
alternatives like cardboard or paper. Food companies have switched to
plastic packaging because they make money by using resources efficiently. A
typical McDonald's discards less than two ounces of garbage for each
customer served-less than what's generated by a typical meal at home.

Plastic packaging is routinely criticized because it doesn't decay in
landfills, but neither does most other packaging, as William Rathje, an
archaeologist at the University of Arizona, has discovered from his
excavations of landfills. Rathje found that paper, cardboard and other
organic materials-while technically biodegradable-tend to remain intact in
the airless confines of a landfill. These mummified materials actually use
much more landfill space than plastic packaging, which has steadily been
getting smaller as manufacturers develop stronger, thinner materials. Juice
cartons take up half the landfill space occupied by the glass bottles they
replaced; 12 plastic grocery bags fit in the space occupied by one paper
bag. Our garbage will bury us. The Mobro's saga was presented as a grim
harbinger of future landfill scarcity, but it actually represented a
short-lived scare caused by new environmental regulations. As old municipal
dumps were forced to close in the 1980's, towns had to send their garbage
elsewhere and pay higher prices for scarce landfill space. But the higher
prices, predictably, encouraged companies to open huge new landfills, in
some regions creating a glut that set off price-cutting wars. Over the past
few years, landfills in the South and Middle West have been vying for
garbage from the New York area, and it has become cheaper to ship garbage
there than to bury it locally. America today has a good deal more landfill
space available than it did 10 years ago. Landfills are scarce in just a few
places, notably the Northeast, partly because of local economic realities
(open land is expensive near cities) but mainly because of local politics.
Environmentalists have prevented new landfills from opening by propounding
another myth.... Our garbage will poison us. By mentioning Love Canal,
Dittersdorf made landfills sound like the Slough of Despond, Bunyan's dread
swamp. But it's not fair to compare modern municipal-trash landfills with
Love Canal, an old industrial dump filled with large concentrations of toxic
chemicals that seeped into the ground when a school was, stupidly, built on
the site. (Even so, it's not clear that any of the schoolchildren were
poisoned. Exhaustive scientific studies around Love Canal haven't detected
any increase in cancer rates.) Today's landfills for municipal trash are
filled mostly with innocuous materials like paper, yard waste and
construction debris. They contain small amounts of hazardous wastes, like
lead and mercury, but studies have found that these poisons stay trapped
inside the mass of garbage even in the old, unlined dumps that were built
before today's stringent regulations. So there's little reason to worry
about modern landfills, which by Federal law must be lined with clay and
plastic, equipped with drainage and gas-collection systems, covered daily
with soil and monitored regularly for underground leaks.

The small-time operators who ran the old municipal dumps can't afford to
provide these safeguards, which is why corporations have moved in, opening
huge facilities that might serve half a state, typically in a rural area
with few neighbors. It's a prudent environmental strategy and it provides
jobs for rural communities, which is why some of them have been competing to
attract new landfills. But the availability of landfill space in the
countryside has created an awkward situation for cities committed to more
expensive alternatives like recycling programs and incinerators.
Environmentalists have responded with a mythical imperative.... We must
achieve garbage independence. When Dittersdorf told the children that New
York City was running out of landfill space, she was technically right.
Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki have promised Staten Island that its
municipal landfill will close in five years, and there's no logical place in
town to put a new one. But why should the city have to use a local landfill?
Why assume that New Yorkers have a moral obligation to dispose of their
garbage near home? Most of the stuff was shipped to the city from factories
and farms elsewhere. What's wrong with shipping it back out to be buried in
places with open land? "I don't understand why anyone thinks New York City
has a garbage crisis because it can't handle all its own waste," says James
DeLong, an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in
Washington. "With that kind of logic, you'd have to conclude that New York
City has a food crisis because it can't grow all the vegetables its people
need within the city limits, so it should turn Central Park into a farm and
ration New Yorkers' consumption of vegetables to what they can grow there."
Some politicians in other states have threatened to stop the importing of
New York's garbage -it's an easy way to appeal to some voters'
chauvinism-but in the unlikely event that they succeeded, they would only be
depriving their own constituents of jobs and tax revenue. We're cursing
future generations with our waste. Dittersdorf's slide showing New Yorkers'
annual garbage output-15 square blocks, 20 stories high-looked frightening
because the trash was sitting, uncompressed, in the middle of the city. But
consider a different perspective-a national, long-term perspective. A. Clark
Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has
calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for
1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep,
by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land
35 miles on each side. This doesn't seem a huge imposition in a country the
size of America. The garbage would occupy only 5 percent of the area needed
for the national array of solar panels proposed by environmentalists. The
millennial landfill would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the range land
now available for grazing in the continental United States. And if it still
pains you to think of depriving posterity of that 35-mile square, remember
that the loss will be only temporary. Eventually, like previous landfills,
the mounds of trash will be covered with grass and become a minuscule
addition to the nation's 150,000 square miles of parkland.

We're squandering irreplaceable natural resources. Yes, a lot of trees have
been cut down to make today's newspaper. But even more trees will probably
be planted in their place. America's supply of timber has been increasing
for decades, and the nation's forests have three times more wood today than
in 1920. "We're not running out of wood, so why do we worry so much about
recycling paper?" asks Jerry Taylor, the director of natural resource
studies at the Cato Institute. "Paper is an agricultural product, made from
trees grown specifically for paper production. Acting to conserve trees by
recycling paper is like acting to conserve cornstalks by cutting back on
corn consumption."

Some resources, of course, don't grow back, and it may seem prudent to worry
about depleting the earth's finite stores of metals and fossil fuels. It
certainly seemed so during the oil shortages of the l970's, when the modern
recycling philosophy developed. But the oil scare was temporary, just like
all previous scares about resource shortages. The costs of natural
resources, both renewable and nonrenewable, have been declining for
thousands of years. They've become less scarce over time because humans have
continually found new supplies or devised new technologies. Fifty years ago,
for instance, tin and copper were said to be in danger of depletion, and
conservationists urged mandatory recycling and rationing of these vital
metals so that future generations wouldn't be deprived of food containers
and telephone wires. But today tin and copper are cheaper than ever. Most
food containers don't use any tin. Phone calls travel through fiber-optic
cables of glass, which is made from sand-and should the world ever run out
of sand, we could dispense with wires together by using cellular phones.

The only resource that has been getting consistently more expensive is human
time: the cost of labor has been rising for centuries. An hour of labor
today buys a larger quantity of energy or raw materials than ever before. To
economists, it's wasteful to expend human labor to save raw materials that
are cheap today and will probably be cheaper tomorrow. Even the Worldwatch
Institute, an environmental group that strongly favors recycling and has
often issued warnings about the earth's dwindling resources, has been
persuaded that there are no foreseeable shortages of most minerals. "In
retrospect," a Worldwatch report notes, "the question of scarcity may never
have been the most important one." It is better to recycle than to throw
away. This is the most enduring myth, the one that remains popular even
among those who don't believe in the garbage crisis anymore. By now, many
experts and public officials acknowledge that America could simply bury its
garbage, but they object to this option because it diverts trash from
recycling programs. Recycling, which was originally justified as the only
solution to a desperate national problem, has become a goal in itself-a goal
so important that we must preserve the original problem. It's as if the
protagonist of "Pilgrim's Progress," upon being informed that he could drop
his sinful burden right there on the road, insisted on clinging to it just
so he could continue the pilgrimage to get rid of it. Why is it better to
recycle? The usual justifications are that it saves money and protects the
environment. These sound reasonable until you actually start handling
garbage.


The Muckrakers' Discoveries

The 1992 Plan projected that the City would realize net savings from
recycling. The Department's experience to date in implementing the recycling
program diverges from the assumptions of the Plan. -1996 Comprehensive Solid
Waste Management Plan of the New York City Department of Sanitation.

EVERY TIME A SANlTATlON DEPARTMENT CREW PICKS UP A load of bottles and cans
from the curb, New York City loses money. The recycling program consumes
resources. It requires extra administrators and a continual public relations
campaign explaining what to do with dozens of different products- recycle
milk jugs but not milk cartons, index cards but not construction paper.
(Most New Yorkers still don't know the rules.) It requires enforcement
agents to inspect garbage and issue tickets. Most of all, it requires extra
collection crews and trucks. Collecting a ton of recyclable items is three
times more expensive than collecting a ton of garbage because the crews pick
up less material at each stop. For every ton of glass, plastic and metal
that the truck delivers to a private recycler, the city currently spends
$200 more than it would spend to bury the material in a landfill. City
officials hoped to recover this extra cost by selling the material but the
market price of a ton has never been anywhere near $200. In fact, it has
rarely risen as high as zero. Private recyclers usually demand a fee because
their processing costs exceed the eventual sales price of the recycled
materials. So the city, having already lost $200 collecting the ton of
material typically has to pay another $40 to get rid of it.

The recycling program has been costing $50 million to $100 million annually,
and that's just the money coming directly out of the municipal budget.
There's also the labor involved. the garbage-sorting that millions of New
Yorkers do at home every week. How much would the city have to spend if it
couldn't rely on forced labor? True, some people would probably be glad to
do the work for free because they regard garbage sorting as a morally
uplifting activity for the whole family. But many others have refused to
follow the law. They seem to have a more traditional view of garbage
sorting: an activity done only for money, and then only by the most
destitute members society.

I tried to estimate the value of New Yorkers' garbage sorting by financing
an experiment by a neutral observer (a Columbia University student with no
strong feelings about recycling). He kept a record of the work he did during
one week complying with New York's recycling laws. It took him eight minutes
during the week to sort, rinse and deliver four pounds of cans and bottles
to the basement of his building. If the city paid for that work a typical
janitorial wage ($12 per hour), it would pay $792 in home labor costs for
each ton of cans and bottles collected And what about the extra space
occupied by that recycling receptacle in the kitchen? It must take up at
least a square foot, which in New York costs at least $4 a week to rent. If
the city had to pay for this space, the cost per ton of recyclable would be
about $2,000. That figure plus the home labor costs, added to what the city
already spends on its collection program, totals more than $3,000 for a ton
of scrap metal, glass and plastic. For that price, you could find a one-ton
collection of those materials at a used-car lot-a Toyota Tercel for
instance-and drive home in it.

LAST YEAR, A SURGE in the market price for recycled materials prompted a
spate of recycling-has-finally-arrived articles. At one point, New York was
selling its old newspapers for $150 per ton, which was almost enough to
offset the extra costs of the paper recycling program. But newsprint prices
have since plummeted back to familiar levels; New York is once again paying
recyclers to take its newspapers, and city officials are resigned to losing
money on recycling. As a result of a lawsuit by City Council members and the
Natural Resources Defense Council, the city has been under court order to
collect increasing amounts of recyclable material to meet goals set in law.
City officials have promised to comply by expanding the recycling program
and promoting a separate program in the public schools, but they've been
stalling because they don't want to increase the budget deficit.

Officials in some cities claim that curbside recycling programs are cheaper
than burying the garbage in a landfill, which can be true in places where
the landfill fees are high and the collection costs aren't as exorbitant as
in New York. But officials who claim that recycling programs save money
often don't fully account for the costs. "A lot of programs, especially in
the early years, have used funny money economics to justify recycling," says
Chaz Miller, a contributing editor for Recycling Times, a trade newspaper.
"There's been a messianic zeal that's hurt the cause. The American public
loves recycling, but we have to do it efficiently. It should be a business,
not a religion." Recycling programs didn't fare well in a Federally financed
study conducted by the Solid Waste Association of North America, a trade
association for municipal waste-management officials. The study
painstakingly analyzed costs in six communities (Minneapolis; Palm Beach
Fla.; Seattle; Scottsdale, Ariz; Sevierville, Tenn., and Springfield,
Mass.). It found that all but one of the curbside recycling programs, and
all the composting operations and waste-to-energy incinerators, increased
the cost of waste disposal. (The exception was Seattle's curbside program,
which was slightly cheaper-by one tenth of 1 percent-than putting the
garbage in a landfill.) Studies in European cities have reached similar
conclusions. Recycling has been notoriously unprofitable in Germany, whose
national program is even less efficient than New York's. "We have to
recognize that recycling costs money," says William Franklin, an engineer
who has conducted a national study of recycling costs for the not-for-profit
group Keep America Beautiful He estimates that, at today's prices, a
curbside recycling program typically adds 15 percent to the costs of waste
disposal-and more if communities get too ambitious. Franklin and other
researchers have concluded that recycling does at least save energy - the
extra fuel burned while picking up recyclables is more than offset by the
energy savings from manufacturing less virgin paper, glass and metal. "The
net result of recycling is lower energy consumption and lower releases of
air and water pollutants," says Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the
Environmental Defense Fund, which has calculated the ecological benefits of
recycling. But there are much more direct-and cheaper -ways to reduce
pollution. Recycling is a messy way to try to help the environment. Consider
a few questions whose answers would seem obvious to the environmentally
aware: Does a S-cent deposit on a soft-drink can help the environment?
Mandatory deposits encourage recycling and reduce litter, but these programs
typically spend $500 for every ton of cans and bottles collected, which
makes curbside recycling look like a bargain. States without mandatory
deposits -like Texas and Washington-have proven that the most efficient way
to reduce litter is to hire clean-up crews, which pick up a lot more than
just bottles and cans. Recycling takes money that could be used for other
clean-up efforts: when New York's Sanitation Department started its
recycling program, it cut back on street cleaning. Are reusable cups and
plates better than disposables? A ceramic mug may seem a more virtuous
choice than a cup made of polystyrene, the foam banned by ecologically
conscious local governments. But it takes much more energy to manufacture
the mug, and then each washing consumes more energy (not to mention water).
According to calculations by Martin Hocking, a chemist at the University of
Victoria in British Columbia, you would have to use the mug 1,000 times
before its energy-consumption per-use is equal to the cup. (If the mug
breaks after your 900th coffee, you would have been better off using 900
polystyrene cups.) A more immediate environmental impact has been
demonstrated by studies in restaurants: the average number of bacterial
organisms on reusable cups, plates and flatware is 20 times greater than on
disposable ones. Should you recycle today's newspaper? Saving a tree is a
mixed blessing. When there's less demand for virgin wood pulp, timber
companies are likely to sell some of their tree farms-maybe to condominium
developers. Less virgin pulp means less pollution at paper mills in timber
country, but recycling operations create pollution in areas where more
people are affected: fumes and noise from collection trucks, solid waste and
sludge from the mills that remove ink and turn the paper into pulp.
Recycling newsprint actually creates more water pollution than making new
paper: for each ton of recycled newsprint that's produced, an extra 5,000
gallons of waste water are discharged. Cost-benefit analyses for individual
products become s o confusing that even ardent environmentalists give up.
After years of studies and debates about the environmental merits of cloth
versus disposable diapers, some environmental organizations finally decided
they couldn't decide; parents were advised to choose whichever they wanted
This sensible advice ought to be extended to other products. It would not
only make life simpler for everyone, but would probably benefit the
environment. When consumers follow their preferences, they are guided by the
simplest, and often the best, measure of a product's environmental impact:
its price.

Polystyrene cups are cheap because they require so little energy and
material to manufacture-without reading a chemist's analysis, you could
deduce from the cup's low price that it's an efficient use of natural
resources. Similarly, the prices paid for scrap materials are a measure of
their environmental value as recyclables. Scrap aluminum fetches a high
price because recycling it consumes so much less energy than manufacturing
new aluminum. The low price paid for scrap tinted glass tells you that you
won't be conserving valuable resources by recycling it. While price is
hardly a perfect measure of environmental impact, especially in countries
where manufacturers are free to pollute, an American product's price usually
reflects the cost of complying with strict environmental regulations. It's
generally a more reliable guide than intuitive moral judgments or abstract
theories about what's good for the planet. A theorist could logically argue
that you have an obligation to recycle not just the paper in this magazine
but also the staples. As a nonrenewable resource, isn't the steel
theoretically even more precious than the paper? Shouldn't you take each
staple to a scrap-metal dealer or, better yet, reuse it in your own stapler?
But if you look at the low price of new staples-and the fact that scrap
dealers aren't scurrying to buy used staples-you can see that it's a waste
of time to worry about posterity running out of staples. Recycling devotees
have too often ignored such signals, preferring programs based on rules
instead of prices, and they've hurt their own cause. They've missed the
obvious solution to America's garbage problems-a solution they should have
recognized from one of their seminal ecological texts.


The Tragedy Of the Dump

THE PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNING of the modern environmental movement can be
found in "The Tragedy of the Commons," a 1968 essay by the ecologist Garrett
Hardin. It is a parable about a village's public pasture, the commons, that
is open free of charge to everyone's cattle. Because no villager has a
personal incentive to restrict the size of his herd, the herds keep growing,
and eventually their overgrazing destroys the commons. The parable is a
useful model for the many environmental problems in which the common good is
damaged by individuals acting out of rational self-interest (like
overfishing of the oceans or pollution of the atmosphere). It applies nicely
to the garbage situation in the many communities where a free town dump has
historically been treated as a commons. There are two ways to avert the
Tragedy of the Commons, as Hardin's essay explains. The first is to convert
the commons to private property, dividing up the land so that every herdsman
owns a piece of pasture and has a personal incentive not to destroy it. The
second is to make rules limiting the number of cattle on the commons. This
approach, government regulation, is the most obvious solution to some
complex environmental problems, especially ones involving global commons
like the oceans or the atmosphere. But garbage is not one of these complex
problems. The Tragedy of the Dump is a simple problem better resolved with
the first approach: private responsibility. Your trash is already your
private property. You should be responsible for getting rid of it. You
should have to pay to get rid of it- and you should pay whatever price it
takes to insure that your garbage doesn't cause environmental problems for
anyone else. Paying for residential garbage collection sounds like a radical
idea in New York and other cities where these costs are hidden in property
taxes, but it's already being done in thousands of communities, including
cities like Minneapolis, San Francisco and Seattle. It's also standard
practice for commercial establishments in New York and elsewhere. Some
cities charge according to volume-the number of bags or cans that you fill -
and some have begun experimenting with charging by the pound.

Once people switch to this pay-as-you-throw system, they throw away
less-typically at least 10 to 15 percent less. Some shop differently, some
take their names off junk-mail lists; some recycle. Instead of following (or
ignoring) arcane rules and targets set by politicians, they're personally
motivated to figure out what's worth paying to discard and what's worth
diverting to a recycling bin. Those who want to recycle for spiritual
reasons can do so; others can recycle whatever makes economic sense to them.
If the pay-as-you-throw system became common everywhere, there would be no
need for recycling laws and goals and moral exhortations. "In a purely
market-driven situation, people would still recycle according to what makes
sense in their area," says Lynn Scarlett, the vice president of research at
the Reason Foundation, which has studied pay-as-you-throw systems. "In most
places it would pay to recycle aluminum cans, corrugated cardboard and
office paper. A lot of newspapers and some clear glass would be recycled.
But people wouldn't meet the high targets set by laws. They wouldn't bother
with some of the things being mandated today, like mixed paper and certain
plastics." Environmentalists don't necessarily oppose free-market reforms
for garbage-they've supported some pay-as-you-throw systems - but they spend
much of their energy crusading for government recycling programs and
regulations. They have instinctively chosen Hardin's second solution. This
is partly because of their ideology-many environmentalists trust government
regulations more than market forces - but there's also another reason. The
leaders of the recycling movement derive psychic and financial rewards from
recycling. Environmental groups raise money and attract new members through
their campaigns to outlaw "waste" and prevent landfills from opening. They
get financing from public and private sources (including the recycling
industry) to research and promote recycling. By turning garbage into a
political issue, environmentalists have created jobs for themselves as
lawyers, lobbyists, researchers, educators and moral guardians.
Environmentalists may genuinely believe they're helping the earth, but they
have been hurting the common good while profiting personally, just like the
village's herdsmen. This is the real Tragedy of the Dump: the waste of
public funds on recycling programs, the needless public alarm about
landfills. Fortunately, though, not every community has been afflicted. For
those seeking the truth about garbage, there's a mountain 300 miles south of
New York that's worth a pilgrimage.


The Celestial City Glimpsed at Long Last

THE MOST SENSIBLE COMMENT I've heard on the subject of garbage was uttered
by Linny Miles as we were looking at a mountain of it near his farm. Miles
grows wheat and raises Thoroughbreds in Charles City County, Va, which has
6,000 residents and one stoplight. Next to his farm, 20 miles southeast of
Richmond, is a landfill that accepts 4,000 tons of trash a day, much of it
from the New York area. Private carters deliver trash from Manhattan
restaurants; sealed rail cars bring municipal waste from suburban New
Jersey. The trash is surprisingly hard to spot. I got lost on the way to the
landfill and drove around the perimeter of the wooded property without
realizing there was garbage hidden back there. I finally got a view of it
from Miles's house, which sits on a rise 200 yards from the edge of the
landfill's property. He pointed to a brown ridge rising above the pine
trees. The ridge was maybe 75 yards high, and the lower slopes were already
covered w ith grass. Miles said he was occasionally bothered by odors and
noise from the unloading operations, but overall he thought the landfill was
good for the county. When I asked if he objected to New Yorkers using
Charles City as a dumping ground, Miles shook his head and explained his
reasoning in one sentence: "They brought something to the party." Ten years
ago, Charles City County had much in common with New York today. It had no
money to fix its decrepit schools. Its economy was stagnant, its tax rate
was among the state's highest and it was being ordered to shut down its old
dump. Now, thanks to its new landfill, the county has lower taxes,
better-paid teachers and splendid schools. The landfill's private operator,
the Chambers Development Company, pays Charles City County fees totaling $3
million a year-as much as the county takes in from all its property taxes.
The landfill has created jobs, as have the new businesses that were
attracted by the lower taxes and new schools. The 80-acre public-school
campus has three buildings with central air conditioning and fiber-optic
cabling. The library has 10,000 books, laser disks and CD-ROM's; every
classroom in the elementary school has a telephone and a computer. The new
auditorium has been used by visiting orchestras and dance companies, which
previously had no place to perform in the county. If you are heavy with
garbage and guilt, Charles City is the place to lay down your burden. There
you can see garbage the way Linny Miles regards it: not as a moral issue but
as an economic commodity. New Yorkers get rid of their garbage cheaply,
Charles City's children get new schools. Why should New Yorkers spend extra
money to recycle so they can avoid this mutually beneficial transaction? Why
make harried parents feel guilty about takeout food? Why train children to
be garbage sorters? Why force the Bridges school to spend money on a
recycling program when it still doesn't have a computer in the science
classroom? Several weeks after Dittersdorf's lecture there, I told her about
Charles City's schools and asked if recycling needed to be so important to
New Yorkers' education. "I wish we spent more money on other things in the
schools here," Dittersdorf said, "and I don't think recycling has a higher
priority than things like computers or art classes. But I'd put it equal.
Sure, kids should have time for other things, for reading and writing and
dreaming. But recycling can be a wonderful project for kids and parents to
do together. It inspires creative work and teaches valuable lessons." Maybe
she's right. Maybe parents and children correctly see the intangible value
of recycling lessons. But as children pursue their moral education, as they
learn to ponder the fate of the earth, it wouldn't hurt for them to also
study, once again, that recycling scene in "Pilgrim's Progress." If Bunyan
were an administrator in today's schools, he might call it a lesson in
prioritizing. The thrifty muckraker, intent on his compost pile, doesn't
notice a figure hovering overhead, offering to trade him a golden celestial
crown for his rake. This scene is observed by the pilgrim, who consults a
helpful guide named the Interpreter. "This is a figure of a man of this
world, is it not, good sir?" the pilgrim asks. "Thou hast said the right,"
the Interpreter replies, "and his muckrake doth show his carnal mind." The
Interpreter points out the waste on the ground and sadly explains that, for
the muckraker, "Things here are counted the only things substantial." The
muckraker has forgotten that there is more to life than hoarding natural
resources. His recycling has become the most primitive form of materialism:
the worship of materials. "Earthly things, when they are with power upon
men's minds, quite carry their hearts away from God," the Interpreter says.
The pilgrim cries out in horror. "O! deliver me from this muckrake."

New York Times, 30 June, 1996.
pps. 24-29,44,48,51,53

[alunr]

I've just been reading that article and I can't believe anyone bothered to print it unless things have substantially changed in the last 8 years.

"But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environrnentally safe landfill."

Environmentally Safe landfill? Ummm. Errr. Can't think of one yet.

Recycling is important. Obviously the guy who wrote that article got stuck behind a recycling pickup lorry or something the night before...

It takes so little effort to recycle certain elements of your rubbish - Kerbside collections, Composting, Bottle Banks, Reuse etc. The stuff thats collected is recycled into useful stuff - Wood composite furniture for parks for example - loads more durable than wood and less of an eyesore than plastic.

The idea that we just keep pumping oil to make our plastic or keep cutting down trees for paper, wood and cardboard is so shortsighted you might as well be looking backwards.

Recycling a plastic bottle may cost a lot of money but the more they get the cheaper it becomes and thats without considering the far lower environmental costs.

End of soapbox rant...

[nevpugh308]

I think that wins the award for the single, largest post !

[bugmeister]

This thread was started to argue about the amount of packaging that is being used, so creating waste that needn't be. I expanded the argument to the Brits general lack of forsight in waste management. Disposal of waste is a very expensive business and in some cases using recycled material can be more expensive than using new. But not usally. If waste is sorted before it is thrown away, then most items can find another use.

As in any argument you will find copious documents from both sides which support their argument. Mine would be to say that we produce far to much un-necessary waste which uses up large amounts of natural resource.

Whilst landfill in the USA may not be a problem, it is in the UK and Europe. In addition landfill sites are hugely expensive to create and maintain. operators have responsibility for the sites for up to 100 years after they finish being used. In reality they are like giant living organisms that create their own waste (methane, assorted nasty liquids) which need to be carefully monitored and siphoned off.

[kevinday]

Yes, I think it is longer than Outlaw's recent effort.

Here in Hungary we have some recycling. The supermarkets sell Coca Cola in 2 litre recyclable bottles... and also in 2 litre disposable bottles

[alunr]

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle says it all really. Pity more people are'nt looking harder at "reduce" really or linking "reduce" and "reuse" together (ala bodyshop).

[alunr]

kevinday said: Yes, I think it is longer than Outlaw's recent effort.

Here in Hungary we have some recycling. The supermarkets sell Coca Cola in 2 litre recyclable bottles... and also in 2 litre disposable bottles

This it the most annoying thing around - none of these companies will commit to reuse as it "lowers the tone of the product". In Goa they HAVE to use glass bottles for pepsi and coke by law. Pity we can't push that one on them in Europe.

Personally if I was running this mess I'd be pushing the big boys like Schweppes to use returnable bottles etc.

[Size Nine Elm]

alunr said:
I've just been reading that article and I can't believe anyone bothered to print it unless things have substantially changed in the last 8 years.

"But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environrnentally safe landfill."

Environmentally Safe landfill? Ummm. Errr. Can't think of one yet.

Recycling is important. Obviously the guy who wrote that article got stuck behind a recycling pickup lorry or something the night before...

It takes so little effort to recycle certain elements of your rubbish - Kerbside collections, Composting, Bottle Banks, Reuse etc. The stuff thats collected is recycled into useful stuff - Wood composite furniture for parks for example - loads more durable than wood and less of an eyesore than plastic.

The idea that we just keep pumping oil to make our plastic or keep cutting down trees for paper, wood and cardboard is so shortsighted you might as well be looking backwards.

Recycling a plastic bottle may cost a lot of money but the more they get the cheaper it becomes and thats without considering the far lower environmental costs.

End of soapbox rant...

On the contrary, the article raises the point that most recycling, currently, does very little other than make people feel better that they are 'doing something'. Don't confuse intention with reality.

I keep telling Mrs Elm that taking glass bottles/jars, washing and rinsing them, and taking them to the bottle bank (even on a trip to the supermarket) is costing more resource than binning it. The energy to heat water, purify/disinfect the water, plus overhead going to recycling, for a product - recycled glass - which has far less demand than supply - is pointless.

Reuse would be a *much* more useful policy, especially with glass. But you need national-level policy for this to happen, and then mandate 'standard' size/colour/shape containers. So that Becks/Stella/Coke/Dettol/Domestos all come in a small number of standard containers.

Landfilling paper is very positive. You grow trees, make paper, and then bury it. CO2 from the atmosphere back into the ground. Future oil/coal... and then you grow more trees, trapping more CO2...

Recycling is a political issue. Ideally, it should work and save the planet. Realistically, and currently, it is pursued for political and well-meaning ends, but for little effect. Well-targeted recycling (aluminium for one) is quite cost effective. Glass? So how much recycled green glass to we consume relative to how much we generate?

[alunr]

Recycling at the moment is'nt cost effective but thats the short term problem - as more suppliers and consumers join into the recycling market it starts to become cost effective.

The biggest problem is one of the "Costs" is unquantifiable - How much does dumping loads of plastic cost us environmentally? Answer that and we can decide wether recycling is cost effective or not.

We unfortunately live in a very disposable society where eveerything from a cardboardbox to a car can be throwna way and replaced if it breaks - The wastage in IT (keyboards, Mice etc) is appauling.

[bugmeister]

[quoteRecycling is a political issue. Ideally, it should work and save the planet. Realistically, and currently, it is pursued for political and well-meaning ends, but for little effect. Well-targeted recycling (aluminium for one) is quite cost effective. Glass? So how much recycled green glass to we consume relative to how much we generate?

---

The major problem with glass is that the breweries will not use recycled product. As a result the majority of the glass that goes into recycling banks is actually used for road surfacing. Get the breweries to change their policy and we can recycle again, unfortunately the political clout of these corporations means it won't happen. At least it is being re-used currently.

[rpguk]

The major problem with glass is that the breweries will not use recycled product.

How come?

I'd imagin it would be ideal for them (more reuse then recycle)

[andytk]

Size Nine Elm said:

Reuse would be a *much* more useful policy, especially with glass. But you need national-level policy for this to happen, and then mandate 'standard' size/colour/shape containers. So that Becks/Stella/Coke/Dettol/Domestos all come in a small number of standard containers.

We still have this in Scotland. As I believe it was phased out a while ago in England.
The bottles are the large (750ml) glass bottles used for Irn Bru. The Barrs company (that make it) also sell Cola, Lemonade etc etc in the same bottles.
Currently you get 25p back for evey bottle. (I think)

One of my mates used to drink this stuff like it was water and had collected 200 bottles under his bed.
He made a mint out of the local shop when he returened them all in the same day. (took a few trips though).

Re use is probabaly the best way forward.

Another thing to remember about recycling is that it also creates a helluva lot of toxic waste. I think you would be better off simply using new trees (from a sustainable forest) to make paper and then simply compost the waste paper along with some treated sewage and eventually you would have usable soil. Less energy (read oil/coal/gas) intesive and gives out less toxic crap during the recycling of paper.

As someone said. Lets look at the reality of recycling and not get caught up in the sanctimoney of it all.

Andy

[oi_oi_savaloy]

What I want to know is; where do they find these hermits to hermetically seal the bags?