RALEIGH – I know it drives environmentalists nuts when their dogmatic prescriptions are described as a new secular religion. That’s not why I think the description is worthwhile (though it is a fringe benefit, I admit). It just so happens that religious metaphors help to explain a lot.
For example, for most of us, recycling is a means to an end. If it results in lower waste-disposal costs, more conservation of scarce resources, or opportunities for businesses, nonprofits, or individuals to make some extra cash, then recycling is reasonable. But if it costs more than it saves, and is merely a roundabout way of discarding materials that we wish would be reused but never are, then recycling is unreasonable.
For true believers, however, recycling seems an awful lot like a sacrament. They do it because it is expected of them, because it makes them feel virtuous, or because they want to make a statement of deep personal conviction. It isn’t a means to an end. It is the end.
Look at what’s going on in Forsyth County. As reported yesterday by the Winston-Salem Journal, the city-county utility commission is struggling to handle the $2.5 million annual cost of the community’s curbside-recycling program. Operated under a contract with Waste Management Inc., the program picks up 11 categories of recycled goods, takes them to a central location for sorting and processing, and then rebates the utility commission based on the amount of usable material picked up. This year, the rebates totaled $220,000 – not a large fraction of the $2.5 million cost.
That might still make sense if local governments saved more money by diverting waste and lengthening the life of public landfills than the net cost of recycling. But the economics don’t work. The utility commission can’t simply pass on the cost of the program to households and businesses because of the existence of private landfills willing to take garbage. The state requires that local governments with landfills set up recycling programs. Private landfills are under no such obligation. In just five years, the share of solid waste in Forsyth disposed of in private landfills has risen from 18 percent to 35 percent. That means there are fewer consumers on whom the cost of the government recycling program can be imposed via higher tipping fees at the landfill.
Naturally, local officials want to resort to force to resolve the dilemma, by shifting the recycling costs into the General Fund and financing them out of property taxes. At current expenditures, that would necessitate a 2.5 percent hike in the property-tax rate. Supporters of this idea point out that Winston-Salem/Forsyth is the only North Carolina community that has attempted to fund its recycling program through waste-disposal fees. But the prevalence of a bad idea doesn’t make it a good one.
The proliferation of private competition for waste disposal has itself reduced stress on the county facility. The annual tonnage has dropped 27 percent in five years. If you want to reduce cost to taxpayers and extend the life of the government landfill, in other words, your goals are being met more effectively by competition than by recycling mandates. However, if the real interest is not cost but simply recycling for its own sake – on the mistaken grounds that reusing resources is always more environmentally beneficial than disposal and replacement – then forcing everyone to participate is inevitable.
Not only has recycling become a sacrament, but the faith of which it is a constituent element is rapidly becoming an official state religion. Ought to be a law against that.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.