Time to Trash Recycling?

So it's too late to see the full article without paying, but this article in the New York Times caught my eye. Basically, the cost of depositing trash at dumps is much lower than was expected in past decades. New methods of compacting the trash are opening up lots of space and keeping prices low. I don't remember exactly, but I think it's around $40 per ton (I could be way off).

That got me thinking. Does recycling make sense? In particular, does it make sense for the government to subsidize recycling programs? No doubt, when industry recycles on its own, that's very likely to be efficient. Apparently steel recycling is very cheap and easy, and there's a market for scrap steel. The question is, what would justify the government stepping in when the market doesn't support recycling? After all, if the recycled material is worth much, companies should pay for it. If it's expensive to dispose in dumps, people should look to recycling as a way of disposing of their waste. If the price companies pay for recycleable material is low, and the cost of disposing it in a landfill is low, doesn't that indicate that the most efficient thing to do is not recycle?

One answer might be that people don't really bear the cost of all the trash they produce. Some trash is thrown into public receptacles, and the whole system is often set up in a way that doesn't create strong incentives to conserve. For instance, trash collecting is often paid with a flat fee, so there's no incentive to reduce trash production. Curbside pickup might be prohibitively expensive for anyone to start up, but the marginal cost might be low for the people already doing the trash collecting, in many cases paid by the city. Trash dumps might impose costs on their neighbors without compensating them. The government might simply want to push society toward the most efficient of many potential equilibria.

All of these seems like pretty thin gruel, though. Steel and glass are probably worth recycling, but I don't know. Plastic and paper are much more doubtful. Given how little it costs to dispose of trash, it's hard to believe it's worth the expense. As disconcerting as it is, one of the most visible environmental virtues might be ineffective or counterproductive.

This critique doesn't necessarily apply to bottle deposits, which might be more of an anti-littering measure. It also doesn't mean that, given the status quo, recycling is inefficient. Given that many fixed costs have already been incurred, the marginal benefit might be worth the marginal cost. Of course, I'd love to see recycling happening through some kind of market process. If aluminum is worth recycling (and I think it is), companies should be willing to pay enough for it that people voluntarily recycle. If curbside recycling is the most efficient way to achieve this, great. The problem with the status quo is that there's no safeguard, no way of knowing that we're better off as a society recycling. Given how cheap it is to dispose of waste, it's very possible that recycling is one of the more wasteful things we do.