Government Garbage

In the loony leftist town where I live, we're ordered to separate our trash into seven neatly packaged piles: newspapers, tin cans (flattened with labels removed), aluminum cans (flattened), glass bottles (with labels removed), plastic soda pop bottles, lawn sweepings, and regular rubbish. And to pay high taxes to have it all taken away.

Because of my aversion to government orders, my distrust of government justifications, and my dislike of ecomania, I have always mixed all my trash together. If recycling made economic sense – and this is an economic question, not a dogma of the mythical earth goddess Gaia – we would be paid to do it.

For the same reason, I love to use plastic fast-food containers and non-returnable bottles. The whole recycling commotion, like the broader environmental movement, has always seemed to have a large malarkey component. So I have never felt guilty – just the opposite – nor have I yet been arrested by the garbage gendarmes. But I was glad to get some scientific support for my position in the December 1989 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Professor William L. Rathje, an urban archaeologist at the University of Arizona and head of its Garbage Project, has been studying rubbish for almost 20 years, and what he's discovered contradicts almost everything we're told.

When seen in perspective, our garbage problems are no worse than they have always been. The only difference is that today we have safe methods to deal with them, if the environmentalists will let us.

The environmentalists warn of a country covered by garbage because the average American generates 8 lbs. a day. In fact, we create less than 3 lbs. each, which is a good deal less than people in Mexico City today or Americans 100 years ago. Gone, for example, are the 1,200 lbs. of coal ash each American home used to generate, and our modem packaged foods mean less rubbish, not more.

But most landfills will be full in ten years or less, we're told, and that's true. But most landfills are designed to last ten years. The problem is not that they are filling up, but that we're not allowed to create new ones, thanks to the environmental movement. Texas, for example, handed out 250 landfill permits a year in the mid-1970s, but fewer than 50 in 1988.

The environmentalists claim that disposable diapers and fast-food containers are the worst problems. To me, this has always revealed the anti-family and pro-elite biases common in any left- wing movement. But the left, as usual, has the facts wrong as well.

In two years of digging in seven landfills all across America, in which they sorted and weighed every item in 16,000 pounds of garbage, Rathje discovered that fast-food containers take up less than 1/10th of one percent of the space; less than 1% was disposable diapers. All plastics totalled less than 5%. ne real culprit is paper – especially telephone books and newspapers. And there is little biodegradation. He found 1952 newspapers still fresh and readable.

Rather than biodegrade, most garbage mummifies. And this may be a blessing. If newspapers, for example, degraded rapidly, tons of ink would leach into the groundwater. And we should be glad that plastic doesn't biodegrade. Being inert, it doesn't introduce toxic chemicals into the environment.

We're told we have a moral obligation to recycle, and most of us say we do so, but empirical studies show it isn't so. In surveys, 78% of the respondents say they separate their garbage, but only 26% said they thought their neighbors separate theirs. To test that, for seven years the Garbage Project examined 9,000 loads of refuse in Tucson, Arizona, from a variety of neighborhoods. The results: most people do what they say their neighbors do: they don't separate. No matter how high or low the income, or how liberal the neighborhood, or how much the respondents said they cared about the environment, only 26% actually separated their trash.

The only reliable predictor of when people separate and when they don't is exactly the one an economist would predict: the price paid for the trash. When the prices of old newspaper rose, people carefully separated their newspapers. When the price of newspapers fell, people threw them out with the other garbage.

We're all told to save our newspapers for recycling, and the idea seems to make sense. Old newspapers can be made into boxes, wallboard, and insulation, but the market is flooded with newsprint thanks to government programs. In New Jersey, for example, the price of used newspapers has plummeted from $40 a ton to minus $25 a ton. Trash entrepreneurs used to buy old newspaper. Now you have to pay someone to take it away.

If it is economically efficient to recycle – and we can't know that so long as government is involved – trash will have a market price. It is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services.

Environmentalists don't seem to understand this. They ask their followers to ignore price signals and cut their consumption of everything from gasoline to paper towels. This one plank in the environmental platform I agree with, since it will make these goods cheaper for the rest of us. I'm happy to have my standard of living raised by voluntary poverty from what Ronald Reagan once called "the tree huggers."

Some liberal economists claim prices can't solve the garbage problem because of 'external diseconomies." Since greedy capitalists are out to make a fast buck, the theory goes, they produce goods that impose costs external to their businesses, i.e., trash. But all businesses have spillover effects, good and bad, and in a free market, this creates opportunities for other entrepreneurs. The donut industry may help make people fat (an external diseconomy). Should it be forced to sponsor Weight Watchers? Or, more to the point, should the public be taxed for a new federal Department of Corpulent Affairs?

The cave men had garbage problems, and so will our progeny, probably for as long as human civilization exists. But government is no answer. A socialized garbage system works no better than the Bulgarian economy. Only the free market will solve the garbage problem, and that means abolishing not only socialism, but the somewhat more efficient municipal fascist systems where one politically favored contractor gets the job.

The answer is to privatize and deregulate everything, from trash pickup to landfills. That way, everyone pays an appropriate part of the costs. Some types of trash would be picked up for a fee, others would be picked up free, and still others might command a price. Recycling would be based on economic calculation, not bureaucratic fiat.

The choice is always the same, from Eastern Europe to my town: put consumers in charge through private property and a free price system, or create a fiasco through government. Under the right kind of system, even I might start separating my trash.