The number one complaint is that it costs more to recycle some categories of waste than to put them into a landfill. What the critics fail to comprehend is that unlike a couple of generations ago when most landfills were owned and run by local governments, today most are run by profit-making enterprises such as Waste Management Inc. and Republic Services Inc. which haul some 80 percent of the nation’s refuse. Those enterprises developed their large centralized landfills for the purpose of keeping down their disposal costs.
Since the private waste disposal industry has organized its infrastructure around cheap landfill disposal, it’s no wonder that landfilling seems like the most cost-effective option. It follows that if we Americans had built a waste infrastructure with the goal of zero waste as Germany did, our infrastructure would naturally have delivered lower costs for recycling than it does.
The Germans landfill about 1 percent of their waste compared to America’s 68 percent. Germans recycle about 70 percent of their waste and burn almost all the rest to produce energy. Americans recycle about 25 percent of their waste and burn about 7 percent.
Consider this analogy. You can make your house energy-efficient in two ways. You can build it to be energy-efficient in the first place. Or, you can add energy-efficient features later on. Which do you think would be more cost-effective?
That’s what we’ve been facing with the boom in recycling. We are retrofitting a system designed for cheap landfilling rather than building a system designed for cheap recycling (which ought to be our goal).
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