Recycling

[cjsmith]

My office building has recyclables containers for a variety of things: glass, white paper, mixed paper, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and maybe more I'm forgetting. But we don't recycle all of it. Glass, in particular, we just throw away. The glass recyclables container gets emptied straight into the trash. The janitor explained that this was because unlike plastics or aluminum, glass for recycle brought very little money per pound, so it wasn't worth the effort.

The ironic thing is that we are five minutes' WALK from the recycling center at the dump. Here we are throwing away big bags of glass every day because we can't be bothered to bring it less than a block.

I am equally lazy, I suspect. I collect a lot of empty glass bottles in my cube because I drink Calistoga fizzy-water. I have set up a box in my office where I put these bottles so the janitor won't collect them from me. Do I bring them half a block to the dump? No, I bring them eight miles home for curbside pickup. That way I make no extra left turns.

Comments

[yoak.livejournal.com]

By "externalities," I mean impact upon individuals not part of the exchange. It is very simple economics that as long as producing new goods is more efficient than producing recycled ones, that's what people will do, and as soon as it is more cost effective to recycle, including people's perceived inconvienance, companies will find profit in incenting people to recycle and then producing recycled goods. Markets can be relied upon to make sure this happens as long as everyone is a relatively free agent.

But when making arguments of this sort, one has to consider whether the parties involved in the market constitute the whole picture, or if there is some other impacted party that should legitimately be considered. For instance, if producing new goods caused billowing, cancinogenic smoke to billow out over the countryside, while recycling was squeeky clean (not true in either case, but for an example...) the market between producers of the good and consumers doesn't take the residual effect upon people outside of the transaction into consideration. There would have to be some universal compensation that balanced such things.

I think the vast majority of externality arguments are silly... and I certainly don't think any apply here. I just felt what I said was pretty conclusive barring this type of argument.

As to the sudden cliff idea, is there any evidense that it might look like that? History doesn't really show us such sudden traumas. I guess the closest would be the depletion of whale oil which happened pretty quickly, but if anything that is testimony that markets will very quickly find alternatives and function well. Though I'm quite sure that this couldn't apply to you, I think most environmental arguments, particularly those about sudden but undefined doom, are loosely veiled hatred for humanity and human accomplishment. The worst part about such animals is that they convince many honest and benevolent people that cooperating with their ends is somehow good and in human interest.