Too much green? Millions spent on recycling

Maryland, Virginia and the District require residents and businesses to recycle, and localities pay millions of dollars to enforce those laws and hit recycling targets.

But some national recycling experts have begun calling for government restraint in trash recycling, which can be more costly and environmentally damaging than dumping.

“We just assume recycling is always better,” said J. Winston Porter, president of the Waste Policy Center, an environmental consulting and policy organization. “But there’s a point at which you shouldn’t just recycle for recycling’s sake.”

Porter is a former policy administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency who helped set the federal government’s first nationwide recycling targets.

Montgomery County recycles 44.2 percent of its waste, with a “formal goal” to recycle 50 percent, said Eileen Kao, Montgomery’s recycling chief.

Similar targets are common in counties around the Washington area — buoyed by constituent demand and sheer achievability — although the EPA calls for 35 percent waste-recycling targets, which is near the current national rate of 33 percent.

Porter agreed that until collection methods and the recycling process –

which is essentially a form of re-manufacturing – become cleaner

and more efficient, recycling about one third of all waste was an ideal

target.

“The negative environmental impact comes from trying to haul too much too far,” Porter said.

He explained that in some local communities, residents are serviced by three separate garbage or recycling trucks each week. Those trucks often travel miles between pickups in rural areas.

Porter said many materials end up in a landfill anyway, despite

the energy expended on transporting and processing, because they have been previously recycled until their useful properties have broken down.

Montgomery County plans to spend roughly $18.8 million on residential recycling collection alone during fiscal 2010. The cost doesn’t include additional millions spent on commercial education and enforcement, advertising, recycling center operations, and other programs and services.

Kao said county officials “painstakingly” examine every taxpayer dollar spent on recycling. But when asked what the county spends each year on recycling, she and other local officials could not provide exact figures.

“I really don’t have that number,” Pamela Gratton, Fairfax County’s recycling manager, said when asked how much the county spends on recycling versus trash collection. Fairfax recycles 40 percent of its trash.

“City officials know it’s much, much more politically popular to recycle than to build a landfill,” Porter said. “So you don’t find very many good numbers, if you look carefully, that show costs.”

  Porter argues that while some recycling is desirable, and both economically and environmentally viable, many local governments are going too far.

“If it doesn’t really help the environment or save energy, or if it isn’t dangerous, a lot of things would just as well rest peacefully in a landfill,” Porter said. He said landfills have become much cleaner and safer during the last two decades, and are plentiful for much of the country.

Kenneth Green, an environmental scientist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said that while recycling some materials — notably aluminum and white office paper — is almost always worthwhile, many other materials are often neither environmentally nor economically justifiable.

“Recycling glass is an environmental net loser,” Green said, pointing out that ground glass is essentially sand and not inherently harmful in a landfill.

“By collecting it in separate trucks and storing it and everything else, you’re probably adding emissions to the environment,” he said.

But unlike plastic bottles and aluminum cans, glass is heavy. And recycling heavy materials pushes localities closer to lofty recycling targets, which are calculated based on waste weight.

Porter says officials should take more time to assess their recycling programs in terms of costs and benefits.

“People want to recycle and it makes them feel good, and it should,” he said. “But don’t just assume that everything you do is going to be good for the environment, or make sense economically, because that’s just not true.”

[email protected]