February 10, 2024: Recycling

Good evening. Today’s topic is recycling of municipal solid waste: how it works, why it is difficult, and how it might move forward.

Media Fast

But before we get to today’s main topic, Lent it coming up. For the unfamiliar, it is customary for practicing Catholics to make a sacrifice during the 46 days of Lent, which extends from Ash Wednesday (February 14 this year) to Easter (March 31 this year in the Western calendar). At the suggestion of my parish priest, I will be doing a media fast this year. That means no video games, no movies or television, no music, no social media, no news or long-form articles, etc. I will carve exceptions for the minimum of what is needed for my job, this blog, and a couple of professional and personal obligations.

I won’t be suspending the blog during Lent. However, expect the next seven pieces to be less link-heavy and to avoid discussion of current events. They will probably be more religiously and/or ethically oriented than usual; see the recent piece on honesty for a template of what to expect. In fact, since there are seven Saturdays in Lent; I am considering a discussion of each of the seven deadly sins over the next seven weeks. This isn’t decided for sure, though.

Don’t worry; I’m not going to go all holy roller on you. I assume that readers dislike being proselytized at as much as I do.

Recycling

After last week’s post on the ozone layer, here’s another topic that people who remember the 1980s and 1990s will remember as being central to environmentalism. I still remember the “recycle, reduce, reuse” jingle. But now, the topic has been largely forgotten, and recycling has developed a rather negative reputation.

Today, I’m going to focus on commodities in municipal solid waste (MSW). MSW is the waste generated by households. As a category, MSW typically excludes electronics and appliances—e-waste, as I discussed last month; household hazardous waste, which includes nasty stuff like paint, antifreeze, etc. that should be disposed of separately; and pharmaceuticals, which should also be disposed of separately. Then there is non-household waste, such as industrial waste, mining waste, construction and demolition debris, and nuclear waste. All of these topics are interesting from a waste management standpoint. As for MSW, we are typically taking about commodity products such as paper, plastic, aluminum, glass, yard waste, food waste, and smaller amounts of other commodities.

In the early days of recycling, it was unclear that recycling of MSW was actually environmentally beneficial. Perhaps the logistics of collecting material and the recycling process would have greater environmental impacts than simply making new material from virgin sources. Since then, enough life cycle analyses have been performed to demonstrate that, for most commodities, recycling does indeed reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In my observation, GHG is a decent proxy for other environmental impacts in most cases, so recycling probably reduces most environmental impacts over virgin manufacturing.

Fears grew about running out of landfill space, and images of mountains of trash became potent symbols of ecological devastation. In August 1986, the Khian Sea (Garbage Barge) became infamous for being unable to find a landfill to dump 15,000 tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia’s municipal incinerators. Much of that ash would be dumped in the ocean, which led to some of the ship operators being sent to jail.

Incidentally, this would not be the last time that an incinerator causes major problems in Pennsylvania. In 2011, the city of Harrisburg, PA declared bankruptcy after years of financial problems stemming from that city’s incinerator. The incinerator caused numerous health and environmental problems as well. Incineration is a bad way to deal with MSW, which might be a subject for the future.

Ultimately, though, the “running out of landfill space” worry is more a function of the permitting process for landfills and has little to do with the actual availability of space. The landfill space required for all plastic, for instance, would be on the order of 0.01% of the world’s surface area (more or less, depending on how deep it is). Landfills do have environmental and health impacts, especially if toxic constituents of waste leach in the groundwater, but those impacts are minimal if the landfill is well-managed, particularly with proper lining to prevent leaching. The impact of most landfills are modest enough that the space can be reappropriated for other uses after the landfill closes, such as Cully Park in Portland, Oregon, a 25 acre park that is built over a former landfill. Even the Fresk Kills landfill on Staten Island, which was once the world’s largest landfill by tonnage and the resting place of much of the rubble from the World Trade Center, has been appropriated into a park.

The most significant environmental impact of recycling is not in avoiding landfills, but in reducing the need to manufacture products from virgin material.

The most valuable high-volume MSW commodity to recycle is aluminum, and for this, several states, starting with Oregon in 1971, have gone beyond moral suasion and into financial incentives with bottle bills. These policies add a charge, now between 2 and 15 cents per container, which is refunded to the consumer upon returning empty containers. Evidence is that bottle bills are more effective in increasing recycling among the target products than curbside recycling.

As an aside, fans of the television show Seinfeld might remember the two-part episode, The Bottle Deposit, in which Kramer and Newman hatch a scheme to transport containers from New York to Michigan to take advantage of the 10 cent refund there, which at the time was the highest in the country. Just in case you get any bright ideas, these sorts of schemes are illegal.

Paper is another lucrative MSW commodity for recycling. About 56% of paper in the United States is recycled, which is pretty good, but not as good at the highest national recycling rate, which is Germany at around 75%. Researchers from the National Renewable Energy Lab have estimated that around $4 billion of unrealized value remains in landfilled paper, given market rates for recycled paper, and another $4 billion are spent on tipping fees. Based on some lifecycle estimates of the impacts of paper recycling, if the United States were to increase paper recycling rates up to the level of Germany, the benefit would be about 240 petajoules of energy saved, 19 million tons of CO2 reduced, 870 million cubic meters of water saved, 7 million tons of solid waste saved, and 1850 square kilometers of forest land for paper not needed, based on 1600 trees her hectare and a tree lifespan of 60 years. These benefits are neither trivial nor enormous.

But estimating the cost of doing this is difficult. I have seen estimates that recycled paper is ~25% more expensive than paper from virgin material, or that the cost is actually less. It depends a lot on commodity markets, which fluctuate greatly from one year to another. And whatever the economics are of increasing recycling rates, there are limits. Paper fibers degrade after 5-7 trips through the recycling process. Fibers partially degrade after every recycling, and so paper is typically “downcycled” into lower-value uses, such as office paper finding a second life in cardboard. Aside from the remanufacturing cost, manufacturers also complain when the level of contamination in recycled paper is high.

Plastic is a more troubled market. A recent Greenpeace report has found that plastic recycling rates peaked at just 9.5% in 2014, and by 2021 (the most recent year for which the report has data) had fallen to 5-6%. A major reason for this drop is China’s Operation National Sword, which in 2018 banned the importation of most plastic waste. It is also unclear whether even the modest 9.5% figure above is correct, since the figures assumed that all plastic waste shipped to China was recycled, which is probably not the case.

Based on 44 million tons of plastic waste each year (the figure for the United States in 2019), the composition of that waste by resin, and some per-ton lifecycle estimates of the benefits of recycling, I estimate that a doubling of recycling rates of HDPE and LDPE—two common resins of plastics—would saving around 100 thousands tons of CO2 emissions, 50 petajoules of energy, and a million cubic meters of water per year. Unlike with paper, these are modest benefits, and again I don’t have a good sense of how economically feasible this is.

The last material I’ll touch on in glass, for which the EPA places the recycling rate in the United States in 2018 at around 31%, much lower than in some other countries. Glass is a bit of a black sheep with MSW recycling, since glass has the nasty tendency to break, contaminating other recyclables in the collection and injuring workers. For this reason, a growing number of curbside pickup programs are banning glass. When recycled, glass is crushed into cullet, which is used to manufacture new glass products, concrete, and many other products.

In recent years, a trend in the United States has been recycled content mandates, or legislation that requires that a certain percentage of certain products use recycled materials. These mandates are controversial. On the one hand, they create demand for recycled material and are hoped to increase recycling rates, which have been stagnant in the United States for a long time. On the other hand, they are not always sensitive to market conditions, and they can backfire by drawing material away from higher-value but not mandated markets into lower-value but mandated markets. Overall, it appears to me to be a rather crude tool for increasing recycling.

Probably the best hope for recycling lies in collection. This is a topic that I hope to address more thoroughly at another time, but in short, it appears to me that how we collect MSW in the United States has much room for improvement. There is a tradeoff, though. Generally speaking, collection systems that more finely segregate waste streams tend to result in lower costs to remanufacturers, but lower participation rates because the system is more cumbersome and confusing for individuals. Conversely, more simplified systems require more expense for sorting at the post-consumer level and yield lower-quality, more contaminated products, but they yield higher rates of participation because they are easier for the public. I would hazard that a two-stream (organic and inorganic) system is the best way to navigate this tradeoff, though I don’t know how best to deal with glass.

At the end of the day, though, the moralistic tone of 1990s recycling public service announcements has been misleading. The socially optimal rate of recycling might be higher than what Americans see how, but it is not 100%. Marginal costs go up with higher levels of material collection and processing, to the point where they eventually exceed the benefits. And as we see with paper in particular, 100% recycling is not even technically possible due to degradation of fibers.

But recycling is a good thing and a success, though a highly incomplete success, of the environmental movement. This is why I find the aforementioned Greenpeace report puzzling and disappointing. And it illustrates a pathology in Greenpeace’s approach to environmental issues that is on display in many others areas, especially their opposition to nuclear power. Greenpeace has a preferred solution for plastic waste: ban single-used plastics. It is not good enough for them to advocate for a ban; they also have to oppose all other solutions, including plastics recycling. And they thereby may be more of an impediment than a help in dealing with the problem.

Quick Hits

In response to last week’s post on ozone, and in particular the prospect of using ozone generators to replenish the ozone layer, a reader pointed out that because ozone (O3) is an unstable molecule, it would not be possible to generate it on the ground; it would be necessary to loft the ozone generators themselves and run them in the stratosphere. This is why I estimated the electricity cost for the generators by using distributed rather than grid energy costs, but nevertheless, the lofting of the generators, plus the oxygen (O2) feedstock for them, adds considerably to the logistical difficulty of this solution relative to stratospheric atmosphere injection. I don’t know if this would be a show-stopping problem.

Paul Cooper of Fall of Civilizations does not release episodes very often, but when he does, they are very good. The latest is in pharaonic Egypt, covering the period from the rise of the Old Kingdom to the fall of the independent New Kingdom dynasty to the Assyrians. The episode is very well-done as always, though at nearly four hours, it is a major investment of time.

Tucker Carlson’s recent junket to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin reminds me of a couple of other recent episodes. In May 1998, ABC’s John Miller became what I think was the last Western journalist to, in Afghanistan, interview Osama bin Laden. In September 2007, then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University, to great controversy, and Columbia president Lee Bollinger gave the harshest introductory remarks I have ever heard. Americans should hear more from their enemies. The bin Laden interview in particular is striking, for in that interview, there is no deception; bin Laden states exactly what he believes and exactly what he intended to do, and what he did do two months later with the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and three years later with the September 11 attacks. One only wishes that Americans had paid more attention. Here is a transcript of the recent Putin interview. It is long and rambling, but it contains many important details, such as Putin’s belief that Poland, and not Germany, is to blame for Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, and that the situation is analogous to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Americans need to know that the president of Russia openly seeks to emulate Hitler.

I recently bought the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, which are 2D remakes of the first six games in the series. There are several versions, and I have them on Windows. Over the last few weeks, I played the original Final Fantasy. Overall it is a pretty good remake, with some greatly appreciated quality of life enhancements, good music, and appealing graphics. My biggest complaint is that the game is too easy. The original NES version of Final Fantasy, which came out in 1987 in Japan and 1990 in the United States, was a difficult and frustrating game. The Pixel Remaster has a minimap which breaks the challenge of dungeon exploration; is too generous with money, so that it is easy to buy an excess of items and make dungeons easy; and is too generous with experience points, so that one might become over-leveled just through ordinary gameplay. Despite this complaint, the game is a lot of fun. I look forward to the other five games after the media fast is over.