Talking Trash
Inside Liberty Watch Today - August 21, 2006
By Doug French
The Clark County Commission, in a rare fit of collective acumen, rejected a plan to institute a pilot program designed to increase residential curbside recycling. This is despite the fact that from 2003 to 2005, only 2 percent of household trash in Clark County was recycled, down from 4 percent in 2000, according to the EPA.
Of course this is a positive trend and whether the commission bagged the recycle program for merely political reasons or not, it was the right decision: The less recycling the better. High minded Greens, on the other hand, believe humans should spend time sifting through their garbage and separating it into various categories to then be placed into separate bins for the refuse company to then pickup.
The idea of reasonably intelligent humans rooting through material that they have no further use for in order to help the garbage company haul it somewhere to be uneconomically turned into something usable is nonsense on stilts.
The pilot program that the commission scotched called for bigger recycling containers and for Republic Services employees to separate the junk. "The problem with our curbside recycling program is it's not convenient," Tara Pike told the R-J's Geoff Schumacher. Really?
That sort of penetrating insight is the reason Ms. Pike makes the big bucks as a Recycling Coordinator at UNLV.
But, the bigger point is that recycling is a waste. As Lew Rockwell points out: "If recycling made sense-economically and not as a sacrament of Gaia worship-we would be paid to do it."
Recyclists act like we're running out of land for landfills, when in fact only 3 percent of the land in America is developed. And, Americans produce less garbage now than Americans did 100 years ago. Each of us throws away less than 3 pounds of garbage a day. A century ago, each home used to discard 1,200 pounds of coal ash not to mention other waste, and today's packaging is much lighter weight.
The problem of course is trying to gain the approvals for a landfill.
New ones are needed but environmentalists would rather have us spend our days pawing through our trash rather than allowing for big holes outside of town and out of sight to be filled with stuff we've decided we could live without.
In two years of digging through landfills, urban archaeologist William L. Rathje found that discarded newspapers and old phone books take up most of the space, not plastic or fast food containers. These phone books and newspapers don't biodegrade, thankfully; otherwise the ink might seep into the groundwater.
Certainly, paper can be reused, thus the idea of at least recycling newspapers and phone books seems to make sense and would save capacity at dumps. However, mandatory recycling ordinances have destroyed the market for old papers. At one time entrepreneurs would pay you for old papers, now you have to pay to have them hauled away.
Commentators like the R-J's Schumacher believe it is our moral obligation to recycle. Local residents' unwillingness to recycle is "a black mark on our community," according to Schumacher. Erin Neff writes that what is rotten in Clark County is not the garbage, but "the trashing of the community's interest."
But, there is not a collective interest and who cares if the EPA or anyone else gives the community a black mark? If everyone recycled would Vegas be a better place to live? No: how could it be? What is the benefit? In fact if everyone was spending time recycling, prosperity would decline because the costs of recycling outweigh the benefits.
And where would this black mark show up? Maybe admission to the Sierra Club's Monkey Wrench Ball is closed to Las Vegans because of the community's lack of Gaia worship.
If my trash were valuable, Republic Services would be willing to pay me for it. As it is now, it's not, so I pay them to pick it up twice a week. However, if Schumacher and Neff would like to make me an offer for my garbage, I'm all ears.
Doug French Columnist Liberty Watch, The Magazine
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