Is garbage collection different from other public services? To answer this question, let us consider a simple hypothetical situation. Suppose a city agreed to provide its residents with all the food they wished to consume, prepared in the manner they specified, and delivered to their homes for a flat, monthly fee that was independent of what or how much they ate. What are the likely consequences of this city food-delivery service? Most likely, people in the city would begin to eat more, because the size of their food bill would be independent of the amount they ate. They would also be more likely to consume lobster and filet mignon rather than fish sticks and hamburger because, again, the cost to them would be independent of their menu selections. Soon the city’s budget would be astronomical, and either the monthly fee or taxes would have to be increased. People from other communities might even begin moving to the city just to partake of this wonderful service. Within a short time, the city would face a food crisis as it sought to cope with providing an ever-increasing amount of food from a city budget that can no longer handle the financial burden.
If this story sounds silly to you, just change “food delivery” to“garbage pickup;” what we have just described is the way most cities in the U.S. have historically operated their municipal garbage-collection services. The result during the 1990s was the appearance of a garbage crisis, with overflowing landfills, homeless garbage barges, and drinking water wells said to be polluted with the runoff from trash heaps. This seeming crisis–to the extent it existed—was fundamentally no different from the food crisis just described. The problem was not that almost nobody wants garbage or that garbage can have adverse environmental effects, or even that we had too much garbage. The problem lay in that we often do not put prices on garbage in the way we put prices on the goods that generate the garbage.
Landfills are considered the final resting place for most of our garbage, although incineration is also widely used in some areas, particularly in the Northeast, where land values are high. Both methods began falling out of favor with people who lived near these facilities, as NIMBY (not in my backyard”) attitudes spread across the land. Federal, state, and local regulations also made it increasingly difficult to establish new waste disposal facilities or even to keep old ones operating. Environmental concerns forced the closure of many landfills throughout the country and prevented others from ever beginning operations.
To reduce the need for waste disposal, pushing recycling became a major campaign. For a while, it seemed that recycling was going to take care of what appeared to be a worsening trash problem. In 1987, for example, old newspapers were selling for as much as $100 per ton, and many municipalities felt that the answer to their financial woes and garbage troubles was at hand. Yet as more communities began putting mandatory recycling laws into effect, the prices for recycled trash began to plummet. Over the next five years, 3,500 communities in more than half the states had some form of mandatory residential recycling; the resulting increase in the supply of used newsprint meant that communities were soon having to pay to have the stuff carted away. For glass, the story is much the same. The market value of the used material is below the cost of collecting and sorting it. Numerous states have acted to increase the demand for old newsprint by requiring locally published newspapers to have a minimum content of recycled newsprint. Because of these mandates, the recycling rate for newsprint has doubled over the past twenty years, but the current rate of 70 percent is thought by many experts to be about the practical maximum.
Recycling raises significant issues that were often ignored during the early rush to embrace the concept. For example, the production of 100 tons of de-inked fiber from old newsprint produced about 40 tons of sludge that must be disposed of somehow. Although the total volume of material is reduced, the concentrated form of what is left can make it more costly to dispose of properly. Similarly, recycling paper is unlikely to save trees, for most virgin newsprint (newsprint made from raw wood) is made from trees planted expressly for that purpose and harvested as a crop; if recycling increases, many of these trees simply will not be planted. Moreover, most virgin newsprint is made in Canada, using clean hydroelectric power. Makers of newsprint in the United States often use higher-polluting energy such as coal. Thus one potential negative side effect of recycling is the switch from hydroelectric power to fossil fuels.
Ultimately, two issues must be solved when it comes to trash. First, what do we do with it once we have it? Second, how do we reduce the amount of it that we have? The fact of the matter is that in many areas of the country, population densities are high and land is expensive. Hence, a large amount of trash is produced, and it is expensive to dispose of locally. In contrast, there are some areas of the country where there are relatively few people around to produce garbage, where land for disposal facilities is cheap, and where wide-open spaces minimize any potential air-pollution hazards associated with incinerators. The sensible thing to do, it would seem, is to have the states that produce most of the trash ship it to states where it can be most efficiently disposed of-for a price, of course. This is already being done to an extent, but residents of potential recipient states are-not surprisingly– concerned, lest they end up being the garbage capitals of the nation. Yet Wisconsin, which imports more than a million tons of garbage each year, is demonstrating that it is possible to get rid of the trash without trashing the neighborhood. Landfill operators in Wisconsin are now required to send water monitoring reports to neighbors and to maintain the landfills for forty years after closure. Operators have also guaranteed the value of neighboring homes to gain the permission of nearby residents and in some cases have purchased homes to quiet neighbors’ objections. These features all add to the cost of operating landfills, but as long as prospective customers are willing to pay the price and neighboring residents are satisfied with their protections–and so far these conditions appear to have been met-it would seem tough to argue with the outcome.
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