Recycling Is Wasteful Summary

Doug Bandow in “Recycling is Wasteful” claims recycling does not help the environment and is too costly to fund. He gives evidence and reasoning to explain why recycling is more harmful than we think. The authors sub claims are: recycling creates more pollution, resources are not scarce, an easier way of handling garbage, and lastly, recycling costs too much money.

The sub claim Bandow has about recycling creating more air pollution has little evidence to back it up, but when factories are producing “renewed” items they are using energy that may or may not needed to be used. The author says “For instance, producing paperboard burger containers yields more air and water pollution and consumes more energy than does manufacturing polystyrene clamshells. It takes more water to recycle newsprint than to make it afresh”. The author claims it would be better to make new materials out of commodities that haven’t already been processed in factories or used by people. Are recycled items really beneficial to the environment or simply a “feel good” factor to thinking we are helping?

The second sub claim is resources are not scarce, which ties into the first sub claim. Bandow states our resources are not scarce because many trees are planted with the intent that they are going to be used specifically for paper. Instead of
companies being regulated on how to remake garbage into something useable they should just turn to the trees that are grown for the purpose of cutting down and start on a clean slate.

The third sub claim the author talks about a more efficient way of getting rid of garbage.
Since garbage is taken to landfills most people perceive the issues of their trash as out of sight-out of mind type of situation, but the amount of trash currently present on Earth is no big fuss because it would not cover much. In this article the support of this sub claim comes from A. Clark Wiseman of Spokane's Gonzaga University, he discloses “At the current rate, Americans could put all of the trash generated over the next 1,000 years into a landfill 100 yards high and 35 miles square. Or dig a similar-size hole and plant grass on top after it was
filled”.

The fourth and final sub claim is that recycling costs too much money. Bandow talks about how there is a cheaper way to dispose of trash than recycling. This claims also relates to the third one, the article mentions how it saves more money to bury our rubbish than to use extra money collecting, processing, and employing people to do the labor part of their recycling job. In the article the author states that it would cost $200 dollars more per to collect recyclable goods than it would to bury them and $40 dollars more per ton to pay companies to break them down and make them into something else. Also paying people for their jobs to guide, clean, and organize the recyclable goods will also cost extra money, more than it would to not recycle at all.