In 1996, New York Times columnist John Tierney gained attention with an opinion piece called “Recycling is Garbage” that questioned the fiduciary responsibility and return-on-investment of municipal recycling programs.
A few years later when a sustained commodities boom took hold, Tierney either set his criticisms aside for more than a decade and a half or recyclers were too busy fulfilling global demand for scrap materials to pay much attention.
In his Oct. 3, 2015, New York Times column “The Reign of Recycling,” Tierney has renewed his criticisms, stating, “It’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill.”
Tierney acknowledges the prior secondary commodities boom by writing, “Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies.”
In the rest of his column, Tierney questions the wisdom of expanding what is collected to include organics and yogurt cups; says there is plenty of room for landfills (and adds that society has become much better at reusing closed landfill spaces); and contends that in its need for manual labor in the form of sorters, municipal recycling is fighting a losing battle in a higher wage climate.
Tierney summarizes his take on the decisions faced by taxpayers and politicians who will no longer benefit from attractive secondary commodity prices by saying, “The recycling movement is floundering, and its survival depends on continual subsidies, sermons and policing.”
Among the responses to Tierney’s column is one prepared by Robin Wiener and the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. (ISRI), Washington. “John Tierney paints a confusing and misinformed picture of recycling, calling it ‘wasteful,’ ‘ineffectual,’ and ‘costly.’ The reality couldn’t be further from the truth,” writes Wiener.
Wiener says the “more than 130 million tons annually of scrap metals, paper, electronics, plastics, rubber, glass, and textiles” collected to make new products “represents nearly $106 billion in annual economic activity and is responsible for 471,587 direct and indirect jobs in the United States, generating more than $4.3 billion in state and local revenue annually and another $6.76 billion in federal taxes.”
The ISRI president also says Tierney “falls short in his analysis of the environmental impact of recycling,” adding that “nearly all independent studies have shown that recycling offers superior environmental benefits to landfilling and incineration.”
ISRI acknowledges that “some segments of the recycling industry—particularly those that handle municipal recyclables—are experiencing unique challenges these days as a result of a changing business model and increasing quality concerns [but] that represents well less than half of the total recycling activity occurring in the U.S. each year.”
Wiener continues, “Unfortunately, by lumping everything together, Tierney sends the wrong message, effectively discouraging people from recycling altogether. Turning our backs on recycling altogether now would significantly hurt the U.S. balance of trade, the recycling industry, the environment and sustainable materials management. That would be a major step backward for our country.”