RECYCLING: THEN AND NOW AND WHERE TO GO

Obviously, “the circular economy” existed long before economies or even civilization. Reusing and recycling was passionately enacted by any person or community not wishing to hemorrhage always-valuable resources of time, energy, material, and money. And this was true at least all the way back to Paleolithic times (prior to 12,000 years ago). Then it wasn’t Oreo cookie packaging or soda cans but, say, a broken hand axe fashioned into smaller knives or flint scraping tools. With the invention of pottery and brickwork humans didn’t stop recycling but took old broken construction materials and pottery and pressed them into new materials or ground them into powder to make new pots or bricks. (And new materials made this way are often stronger and better…) Unsurprisingly then, when we eventually developed paper and glass we became no less interested in reusing or recycling.

But the modern enthusiasm for recycling really took off after the resource depletion panic of the 1970s. This was spurred by the Club of Rome report The Limits of Growth, which was shortly accompanied by the dystopian film Soylent Green (about the year 2022, where global warming and overpopulation had resulted in critical shortages of water, food, resources leading civilization to cannibalism and the brink of collapse) and twin oil shocks of ‘73 (relating to OAPEC nations cutting oil for the US and allies who backed Israel during the Yom Kippur War) and ‘79 (when the Iranian Revolution disrupted oil exports.) 

By the time I was going to school in the ’80s “the three Rs” marketing scheme had caught on and the plot had mostly shifted to protecting the environment — and this shift was most curiously simultaneous with municipalities busily producing millions of new plastic receptacles for homes, businesses, and public spaces, scores of giant collection trucks to compete with their garbage fleet, all while sequestering vast swathes of land for recycling depots, transfer stations, and waste management sites.

Just as any of our ancestors would have, most of us took up this new pledge to clean, sort, and put out our plastic, aluminum, glass, and paper to be picked up, trucked across town, cleaned again, and melted down or otherwise managed. But, as it turns out, no one really considered the costs (really any of them) because, apparently, they felt they were doing good. And, as it turns out, nearly anything can be recycled if you don’t care about the social, environmental, financial, or energy costs of doing so. And any such program is made all the more palatable if everyone ignores the human labour cost incurred across all of society, too.

As we learned, the world’s wealthiest nations spent decades collecting low-value plastic and shipping a huge amount of it to poorer countries that promised, but largely failed, to recycle it. Because almost 90% of these plastic exports were shipped to developing countries struggling with their own waste management, recent evaluations landed at conservative estimates of up to 75% of plastic waste being mismanaged through burning or open dumping once arriving at their destination. Even though this trade largely collapsed when nations like China imposed import bans on recyclables, as much as 10% of land-based plastic entering our oceans is still said to come from virtuous suburb-dwellers in North America and Europe who’ve done the right thing and collected, cleaned, sorted, and shipped their recycling all over town and across the planet for “recycling.”

It also took a full generation after imposing recycling on everyone before studies really spelled out the obvious, that a million people spending almost no time at all, just a second on a task, amounts to a tremendous collective labour. Eventually we saw studies out of Norway and Sweden showing the time commitment was far higher than suspected in many places. It turned out that it took individuals 3-4 minutes a day or 20-30 minutes per week to recycle. And then valuing that time at anything at all, just half the local minimum wage for instance, and you would have to add something like €40-50 billion per year to the real cost of recycling if you just expand the assessment out to the whole of the EU. The number is more than double that for just the 38 OECD member nations. I hope you’ll agree that $115,000,000,000 USD is pretty far from the irrelevant externality or nothing that the labour of recycling is commonly assessed at and framed as.

But should we be recycling at the rates we are? Ever-diligent Japan is our best source of data on municipal waste. The current solid waste recycling goal set by the government in Japan sits at 28% while Japan's Ministry of the Environment tells us the actual recycling rate achieved at the municipal level sits at around 20%. But a study from 2014 attempted to determine the optimal recycling rate — the sweet spot where benefits truly exceed the costs. Bold. That figure? Just 10%. The study tells us municipal management costs alone are actually minimized between 7% and 8%. If you recycle less than this, they show, you will lose out on the gains from recycling some metals and plastics; recycle more than this and you waste too many resources for too little benefit. The authors explain how “These results are robust to changes in the components of social costs, indicating that Japan and perhaps other developed countries may be setting inefficiently high recycling goals.” Makes you wonder what evidence was used to set out recycling targets in the first place.

That’s pretty interesting and is corroborated by a more recent US study. An analysis from last year tried to work from scratch, imagining a municipality designing its waste management system from nothing with concern for environmental, economic, and social impacts and by evaluating every possible combination of landfill, incineration, recycling, and composting for greatest impact. The ideal program? Collect all waste in one bin, deliver it to a central sorting depot, mechanically extract recyclables and organics, turn the organics into biogas and soil, and incinerate the rest. In this scheme about 50% is incinerated, roughly 40% is composted, and around 10% gets recycled. So it looks like something along these lines is what the world would look like if we weren’t running our cities on vibes and good intentions and actually considered what matters to us all — or just some of the details.