Danielle Zanzalari and A.K. Shauku post regularly at Economics and Institutions. Yesterday’s post, Recycling Wastes resources, Not Saves, is a summary of the myth of recycling prompted by a recent article on Forbes.
If you’ve ever seen Wall-E, an animated Disney film revolving around the impending doom of apocalyptic proportions caused by an overabundance of trash, then you’ve seen the prophecies of EPAschatology fulfilled. However, Ms. Zanzalari quotes some CATO institute findings that state,
We are not running out of landfill space. “All of the trash America will produce over the next 1,000 years could fit into a landfill 15 square miles in size.” Politicians like to claim that we are running out of space, because states are not building new landfill facilities, while many facilities have shut down due to high regulatory costs in recent years. With less landfills and the same, or more, amounts of trash there will be less capacity for trash. However, we are not lacking space to build new landfills if regulations and costs were cut down.
The article at Economics and Institutions is filled with links concerning this national religion of recycling. The final link is to a Penn & Teller segment on YouTube. Those of you familiar with Penn & Teller already know of their crass approach to the dissemination of information. Those of you who are not familiar with them will figure it out by the title. (Concerning the Penn & Teller link, Caveat Inspectoris.) In this ten-minute segment they summarize that recycling may make us feel good, but it is “feeling good for no good reason.”<>
