Recycle or Else!

The Vermont Senate is hard at work on the latest in a series of environmental mandates, designed not to curb harmful pollution, but to tell Vermonters how to run their lives.

The people who made it a $50 offense for each day that a Vermonter possesses a politically incorrect flourescent bulb - and came close to prescribing what kind of showerheads Vermonters could have in their bathrooms - have returned to one of their favorite causes: mandatory recycling.

The argument in favor of recycling goes like this: humankind is pillaging the planet to create stuff, which is usually marketed (by corporations, of course) in packages. Used up, worn out, and no longer fashionable stuff and its packaging become waste. This waste is discarded, collected, and hauled to the landfill.

Landfills are ugly monuments to the wastefulness of the human race, and nobody wants to live near one. To minimize the flow of waste into landfills, thus making them last longer and postponing the costly, time-consuming and politically contentious process of creating new ones, everyone must be made to do what environmentally-conscious True Believers do, recycle. Besides, it's Right and Good to recycle, and those who raise questions about the economics of recycling must be made to understand that this is a Great Moral Question, not one of mere vulgar economics.

In 1987, spurred by this quasi-theological need to promote recycling at any cost, the legislature passed Act 78. This misbegotten statute has spawned solid waste districts across most of Vermont, burdened local governments with endless requirements for solid waste plans, shifted huge amounts of money from everybody else to lawyers, and claimed untold millions of taxpayer dollars. About half of Vermont's towns already have mandatory household recycling, decreed in most cases by these specialized units of government.

The new proposal in the Senate (S. 271) forces mandatory recycling on the rest of the state, whose solid waste districts and municipal governments haven't dared to impose it on their citizens. The bill requires every person to separate at least five types of solid waste from the waste stream and take them to a central facility, or pay somebody to take them there. The five types are to be announced by each town or solid waste district. Waste haulers are forbidden to knowingly transport non-separated waste, under penalty of law.

What happens to violators? If the government finds that the violation seems to the government to be "highly probable", its police force will issue the equivalent of a traffic citation. The way the bill is written, the Title 10 fine in the worst case could be as high as $25,000 per violation. Some might say that when the government can hit you with a $25,000 fine for tossing non-returnable (New Hampshire) aluminum cans into your kitchen trash bag, it has taken one more big step toward becoming an environmental police state.

Not only that, but most of the time most "recyclables" cannot be disposed of at a profit, especially when they have to be collected, sorted, shredded, baled, and hauled by fuel-guzzling trailer trucks as far as South Carolina to find buyers. The waste management companies have to cross-subsidize their losses from this foolish practice by increasing the bills households and businesses pay for the disposal of non-recyclable trash. Feeling good about ourselves doesn't come cheap.

The religion of recycling took a major hit in June, 1996 when John Tierney of the New York Times Magazine published an article forthrightly titled "Recycling is Garbage." After an extensive survey of recycling efforts, Tierney wrote: "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 [he might have added solid waste districts]- 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."

Act 78 correctly declared that "generators of waste should pay disposal costs that reflect the real costs to society of waste management and disposal." Starting from that sound principle, we should let the free market recycle whatever is economically worthwhile to recycle. The waste management companies would charge households and businesses for picking up worthless trash destined for the landfill. Other enterprises, like scrap metal dealers and community recycling centers, would accept some recyclables for free, and perhaps pay for things like aluminum and cardboard if the market is high. The government should renounce the idea of forcing everyone to subsidize recycling where somebody has to be paid to take the stuff, along with the idea of forcing everybody to recycle or face the trash police.

The state should make provision for educating consumers about environmentally sound waste disposal, disposing of household hazardous waste (drain cleaner, nail polish etc.), encouraging voluntary community recycling efforts, and efficiently permitting and monitoring well-designed landfills and incinerators. Oh yes, and selling off Vermont's solid waste district facilities to private waste companies or local cooperatives.

Postscript: the mandatory recycling bill was not acted upon by the Senate in the 1998 session.

March 1998