From: thant@void.esd.sgi.com (Thant Tessman)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian
Subject: Trash
Date: 14 Sep 92 19:02:07 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA


From Reason Magazine, Aug/Sept 1991


Talking Trash
by Virginia I. Postrel
and Lynn Scarlett


You expect it from Jeremy Rifkin.  He calls himself a "time rebel," at war
with modernity, and denounces "our profligate way of life."  He writes, "We
boast that we are the first consumer society in history and even tout a
consumer movement, apparently unaware of the irony implicit in the word.
The term 'consumer' dates back to the fourteenth century and, in both its
English and French form, has meant 'to devour,' 'to lay waste,' 'to
destroy,' and 'to exhaust.'"  When Jeremy Rifkin tells shoppers, "Remember,
if it's disposable and convenient, it probably contributes to the
greenhouse effect," you can figure he has more on his mind than the
atmospheric effects of Bic razors.

But what about Thrifty drugstores?  These not-so-green purveyors of
bubble-wrapped jars of makeup, single-serving candy bars, disposable
diapers, and lead-acid batteries are handing out green-and-white leaflets
(printed on recycled paper) that urge shoppers to "Reduce-Reuse-Recycle."
The environmentalist mantra has gone commercial.

It has also gone political.  And translated into political language,
Thrifty's homily becomes an economic agenda that extends central planning
backwards from the trash can to the kitchen shelf to the supermarket to the
wholesaler to the manufacturer.  Under the guise of managing our solid
waste, we are adopting, bit by bit, a national materials policy based on
the ideal of consuming no materials at all.

As the Source Reduction Council of the very-estiblishment Coalition of
Northeastern Governors puts it, "the basic objective...is to eliminate, to
the maximum extent possible, packaging as a waste product."  CONEG's
"preferred packaging guidelines" put "no packaging" at the top, followed by
"minimal packaging," "returnable, reusable, refillable," and "recycled
content, recylable."

David Morris, director of the Institiute for Local Self-Reliance, a radical
but widely cited prorecycling group, writes, "We must keep our eyes on the
prize: a drastic reduction in our per capita consumption of materials."

The agenda enunciated by Morris and the CONEG Source Reduction Council is
founded not merely on anticonsumption zealotry (with a dollop of corporate
opportunism thrown in).  It is based on widely held misconceptions about
Americans and their garbage.  The United States does have some real solid
waste problems, but they are amenable to fairly simple solutions that
require less, not more, government planning.

---

Perhaps it all started with Mobro, the Islip, Long Island, garbage barge.
Back in 1987, the barge wandered from port to port, searching for some
place that would accept the garbage it carried.  After six states and three
countries rejected its load, Mobro returned to New York.  A Brooklyn
incinerator burned the trash, and the waste ash went home to a landfill in
Islip.

The Northeastern landfill shortage became a national story.  Newspapers and
TV shows told tales of the nation's impending garbage crisis.  Landfills
were closing.  Waste was mounting.  Soon every city in the land would have
a garbage-filled barge roaming the seas.

The reports scared people.  Politicians who had been content to leave
garbage management to specialists decided something had to be done.  So
they passed laws.  In the early '80s, only 140 American cities had curbside
recycling programs.  Today, however, more than 2,700 communities nationwide
pick up residents' cans, bottles, and newspapers for recycling.  In most of
these places, recycling is mandatory for at least some residents.

More important, 28 states enacted recycling or waste-reduction quotas -
Florida, for instance, will require 30-percent recycling by 1994, a demand
that has solid-waste managers there in a near panic.  Another five states
have set nonmandatory goals.  (The Envoronmental Protection Agency
recommends a 25-percent diversion of the solid-waste stream by 1992, 50
percent by 1997.)  Once enacted, these increasingly common laws drive all
solid-waste management decisions in their states.  They shift the policy
emphasis from safe and efficint waste disposal to reducing consumption.

Although its targets are only recommendations, the EPA has played a major
role in that shift.  In 1989 the agency issued a roport, 'The Solid Waste
Dilemma: An Agenda for Action,' in which it identified four means of
managing solid waste: 1) source reduction; 2) recycling; 3) incineration;
and 4) landfilling.  These are, in one form or another, the options people
have had since the Stone Age.  But the EPA didn't just list the options.
It ranked them.  It created a waste-management hierarchy, with source
reduction at the pinnacle, flanked by reuse and recycling.  Incinerators
and landfills were left roveling in the dust, grateful that they were
allowed to exist at all.  Although it acknowledged that sound solid-waste
management would involve all four options, the EPA made it clear that in
all situations source reduction and recycling are preferable to burning or
burying trash.  "Reduce-Reuse-Recycle" became the national standard.

The EPA hierarchy diverts government policy from "integrated waste
management," the technocratic way of mixing the four options in whichever
combination best fits local needs.  Instead, it has prompted - and given
political support to - a mania for aggressive recycling and
source-reduction efforts, regardless of cost, overall resource use, or
local conditions.  The EPA has lent respectabliltiy, even urgency, to
calls like David Morris's to "demand and immediate halt to policies that
promote materals destruction.  That would include not only stopping
incinerators, but ending the promotion of degadable plastics whose
destination is not the recycler but the landfill."

In the wake of the EPA's report, members of Congress have proposed
amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and Solid
Waste Disposal Act (SWDA) that would among other things:

- Require that nonrecyclable materials be biodegadable and prohibit, after
five years, any material that is neither biodegradable nor recyclable.

- Create a National Packaging Institute to establish national packaging
standards.

- Mandate a return deposit on plastic and glass containers.

- Ban in interstate commerce any plastic container that isn't marked with a
code indicating its composition to recyclers.

RCRA, better known for its hazardous waste provisions, is up for
reauthorization this year, so Congress will soon be seriously considering
amendments.  (So far, however, most of the action to move the country
toward a national materials policy has occurred on a piecemeal basis, at
the state level.

---

"If you don't recycle, Santa Monica will look like the inside of this
truck," read the signs on the garbage trucks that rumble through the city's
streets.  Santa Monica, California, is the kind of city that paints its
garbage trucks sea blue, instead of the usual grunge-hiding dark green.
And it's the kind of city that started a recycling program in 1981, a
decade before it was fashionable.  Recycling costs the city about
one-and-a-half times as much as ordinary garbage collection and
landfilling.

"These guys drive an awful lot of miles sometimes to pick up very little,"
says Thomas Dever, Santa Monica's solid-waste manager.  After nearly a
decade of practice, Santa Monicans recycle about 12 percent of their
garbage - through a curbside recycling program, a buyback center, and
various small recycling companies.

Denver's job is to push that recycling rate up - way up.  The state of
California has decreed that all cities must cut the amount of trash going
into landfills or incinerators by 25 percent by 1995, 50 percent by 2000.

Denver is a can-do guy, and he says he can get Santa Monica to 25 percent
recycling by '95.  Of course, hitting that target will mean more expense -
for a plant to sort and process recyclables and expanded recycling program.
Two-thirds of the city's refuse is commercial, and about 40 percent of
that, mostly corrugated cardboard, can be recycled.  If the city's many
small businesses will turn in their cardbard and office paper, and if a
combination of economic incentives and jawboning can raise residential
rates from the current 4 percent ("tokenism," says Denver) to around 7
percent, the city can make the 25-percent quota.

But 50 percent - that's a different story.  To meet that target, he says,
will depend on "source reduction."  There's only so much you can recycle,
even when cost is no object.

Although it can just mean using less material - say, cutting the weight of
a plastic milk jug from 95 grams to 60 grams, as manufacturers did over the
last 20 years - "source reduction" as a policy goal often leads to product
bans.  North Carolina will outlaw polystyrene foam (such as Styrofoam) food
packaging after October 1, 1993, if it isn't being recycled at a 25-percent
rate.  Several cities, such as Portland, Oregon, and Newark, New Jersey,
have already effectively banned the stuff.  A bill in California would
prohibit the sale of compact-disk "long boxes."  In 1989 Maine banned
aseptic packaging - the small, rectangular beverage boxes especially
popular with children.  (The ban exempted Maine apple juice.)  Other cities
and states have proposed bans on disposable diapers.  Indeed, one proposed
law in Oregon would make possession of disposable diapers a criminal
offense.

Such bans usually have little to do with actual solid-waste problems, much
less overall environmental impact.  An aseptic drink box, for instance, is
among the most "source-reduced" containers on the market, tipping the
scales at a mere 10.3 grams.  By contrast, the traditional gable-top drink
carton, which requires refrigeration and takes up more room in transit,
weighs 90 percent more, or 19.6 grams, and holds slightly less juice, 8
ounces versus 8.45 ounces.  Similarly, the much maligned polystyrene foam
is one of the lightest container materials around.  In both cases, the
materials can theoretically be recycled, but accumulating enough stuff to
make recycling economical is quite difficult.  By the same token, these
lightweight, low-volume materials take up very little landfill space: 0.02
percent for drink boxes, only 0.002 percent for polystyrene food
containers.

---

Solid waste policy used to be left to calm problem solvers like Tom Dever.
But the chance to pick and choose which products people should use - and
dispose of - brings out emotional paternalists like California state Sen
Daniel Boatwright.

It's a Wednesday afternoon in early May.  The state Senate committee on
which Boatwright sits has been hearing testimony on a proposal to levy an
excise tax on disposable diapers.  The hearing has been perfuntory, with
only two witnesses allowed to speak on each side.  Another 10 or so have
gone on record against the bill, many submitting written materials.  To
show how the tax would hurt poor mothers, for instance, Gloria Torres has
given the Senate committee a breakdown of a couple of family budgets.  Each
family spends $84 a month on disposable diapers.

It's Sen. Boatwright's turn to speak.  The quiet committee room explodes
with his anger.  "These are AFDC mothers, they have other clothes to wash
and if they're spening that much money, I would certainly urge those people
to go to *cloth diapers* to save $84 a month."  Boatwright gets madder, his
voice more contemptuous.  He points to committee members.  "He, he, he,
she, we raised our kids with cloth diapers.  And you know, it didn't kill
'em at all.  It didn't kill 'em.  Got your hands a little dirty, maybe, but
it didn't kill 'em.  It's a hell of a lot more convenient to use disposable
diapers, but you know what - you save a lot of money when you use cloth
diapers."

Boatwright is a liberal Democrat, not expecially prone to frugality.  He
doesn't begrudge the mothers the money they get from the state.  He just
doesn't approve of the diapers.  Like Grumpy Old Man on "Saturday Night
Live," he remembers the old days, when life was lousy "and we *liked* it
that way."  Despite Boatwright's outburst, the bill dies, failing to get a
motion in its favor.

The diaper bill, and the outburst, are minor but indicative.  Disposable
diapers account for less than 2 percent of the nation's solid-waste stream.
But they make great symbols.  Mankind - or, more accurately, womankind -
managed to do without them until about 1970.  They're highly artificial,
engineered of plastic and synthetics and paper.  You use a diaper once,
then dicard it.  Disposable diapers seem self-indulgent, the kind of silly
convenience that puts the 'waste' in solid waste.

On similar grounds, Greenpeace has attacked facial tissues, and Hannah
Holmes, an assistant editor of 'Garbage' magazine, has denounced tampons.

In the water-short West, of course, it's easy to counter that cloth diapers
consume a resource far more precious than landfill space.  And much public
debate has focused on whether, in fact, disposable diapers really are
"worse" for the envoronment than their predecessors.  Several life-cycle
assessments - studies that try to look at all of a product's envoronmental
impact from manufacture to disposal - have examined disposable diapers,
each with somewhat different results.  One assessment gave disposables a
better environmental report card than cloth diapers; others showed the
opposite.  And so the debate goes on.  

But arguments over cradle-to-grave studies miss the point.  The studies
show the costs of various options, the trade-offs between water use and
energy needs and air pollution and solid waste.  They don't show the
benefits.  They don't consider why consumers buy disposable diapers or why
juice makers use aseptic packaging.  Pampers or Huggies or, for that
matter, Kleenex tissues may fill up landfills faster than cloth diapers or
handkerchiefs.  But the people who buy them care bout other values, too -
convenience, or health, or comfort.

When it switched from polystyrene to paper wrappings, McDonald's improved
the environmental impact of its packaging.  But it now risks losing
customers who want to keep their hamburgers hot on the way back from the
drive-through or whose kids like the old Happy Meal box better than the new
paper sack.  While McDonald's presumably weighed these trade-offs,
legislative proposals to ban or regulate disposable products seek to
replace such weighing and balancing with political dikats.  They seek to
tell McDonald's competitors that they must also switch, even if they value
their takeout business - and the polystyrene containers that keep it hot -
more than they fear environmentalists' attacks.

---

Product regulations also treat similar products as though they serve
identical needs, differing only in their environmental impacts.  This may
be true of some products - it's hard to see any substantive difference
between bleached and unbleached coffee filters - but it isn't true of most.
Both kinds of diapers cover Baby's bottom, but each offers a distinct
bundle of other qualities.  Cloth diapers are less expensive and, if
changed promptly, may be more comfortable.

Disposables, on the other hand, appear to prevent diaper rash, leak less,
and are much more sanitary and convenient for use in day-care centers.
Indeed the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health
Association's day-care program performance standards state "that to protect
the public's health, cloth diapers should not be used in day-care centers."
Most state day-care regulations forbid caregivers to rinse cloth dapers, so
that not using disposables means sticking dirty diapers in plastic bags or
diaper pails and sending the whole package home with Junior.  Needless to
say, day-care providers have been vocal opponents of bans or taxes on
disposables.

Or go back to Gloria Torres's welfare mother.  She has four kids, no
washer, no dryer, and no car.  Once a week, she does three loads of
clothes at a laundry; each load costs $1.25 to wash and dry.  Her kids go
through 288 disposable diapers a month, about 10 a day.  Since disposable
diapers are more absorbent than cloth diapers, we can ssume she'd need at
least a dozen cloth diapers each day - and would probably wind up going to
the laundry daily.  (This is a conservative estimate; it often takes two
cloth diapers to replace a single disposable.)

This mother already pays $100 a month for people to take her places.
Dragging a heavy pail of dirty diapers to the laundry every day or two
would mean more rides.  It's true cloth diapers would probably still save
at least some money, perhaps as much as $50 a month.  Nevertheless, it's
hardly surprising that poor mothers choose to sacrifice other purchases to
buy disposables.  Time and trouble, even a welfare mother's time and
trouble, are also limited resources.

Products don't exist in isolation.  The economy is a complicated web of
interactions.  Disposable diapers are substitutes for laundry facilities.
They are complements to day care, as are drink boxes that let even tiny
kids brown-bag it.  On the manufacturer's level, packaging can substitute
for warehouse space or factories.  The exotic layering of metals and
plastics that keeps Keebler cookies fresh for as long as nine months after
they leave the oven lets the company distribute them throughout the United
States without having a plant in every city.  Combined with new recipes,
the packaging lets you buy cookies that are still soft months after they're
made.

And packaging often reduces waste.  When William Rathje, of the University
of Arizona, took his garbage-archaeology team to Mexico City, they found
that the average household in Mexico City "discards 40 percent *more*
refuse each day than the average USA household."  Rathje writes, "This
difference - 1.6 punds per household per day - is food debris, the skins,
rinds, peels, tops, and other inedible parts discarded in food
preparation."

For instance, in Mexico City, most consumers squeeze fresh oranges to make
orange juice.  The peels are then thrown away.  Americans, by contrast,
tend to buy packaged frozen concentrate.  As a result, the typical Mexican
household tosses out 10.5 ounces of orange peel each week; the typical
American household throws out 2 ounces of cardboard or aluminum.
Meanwhile, back at the orange juice factory, the peels are collected and
sold to make animal feed and other products.  If all the orange juice
drinkers in New York Cidy individually tossed away their orange peels, one
day's haul would weigh as much as two ocean liners.

This isn't to say that people shouldn't drink fresh orange juice.
Certainly, it tastes better than processed juice.  But the notion that "no
packaging is the best packaging" fails even the dumpster test.

The economy's complex interactions can produce surprising results.
Consider a study by the research group GVM that examined what would happen
if all plastic packaging were eliminated in the Federal Republic of
Germany.  The report found that materials usage by weight would increase
fourfold, as substitutes replaced plastic.  Packaging costs would more than
double.  Energy consumption would almost double.  And garbage would
increase by 256 percent.  The report comments, "all of the cost-intensive
endeavors, over many years, to reduce the use of material through more
suitable packaging and 'slimming down' individual packaging materials would
be [reversed] with one stroke."

---

Richard Pence isn't all happy with Ohio's new requirement that 25 percent
of all garbage be recycled by 1994.  His family business, Pence Refuse
Service, has been hauling trash since 1958.  Now the state says they have
to get into the recycling business: "They want you to get started right
away.  There's not much chance to gear up for it."  What's more, the
company is required to weigh the trash it collects at each stop - not in
order to charge customers by the pound but to see whether they're meeting
the 25-percent target.  "The bookkeeping is unreal," says Pence.

The nine-employee company is struggling to adapt.  It is separating and
baling cardboard, milk jugs, and such, despite the lousy economics.  Baling
900 pounds of corrugated cardboard costs $25, not including collection and
sorting, but buyers will only pay $20 to $30 a ton for it.  Recycling, says
Pence, "takes a lot of money to operate, and there's no money in it.  It's
rough on a little company."

The work is hard and, Pence fears, dangerous.  A few years ago, he
suggests, the government probably wouldn't have even let you do it:  "You
handle all these pop cans, all these food cans."  Using a new can baler, "I
got cut twice yesterday.  That has to be a health hazard."  He's afraid for
the family members who work with him.  Some of his fears aren't well
grounded - nobody ever got AIDS from a used soda can - but it doesn't seem
crazy to wonder what evils might lurk in a used milk jug or the rim of a
tin can after they've sat around in the good old summertime.

So far, Pence Refuse has managed with its regular trucks and small
building.  But Dick Pence expects he'll need to invest in more-specialized
trucks and add a $200,000 building to use as a processing center.  The
costs, he figures, will be passed on to the businesses whose trash the
company hauls away.  Contrary to 'The Recycler's Handbook' (from the folks
who brought you '50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth'), it is not
true that "recycling saves towns and consumers money."

In fact, the move to recycle rather than dump or burn trash can cost
plenty.  A survey of Rhode Island communities found that the total cost of
recycling - including pickup and processing, minus revenue from the sale of
recycled materials - often runs more than $180 a ton, compared to the $120
to $160 a ton for ordinary waste collection and disposal.  The outlay is
especially high in cities with many multifamily dwellings.  In Chicago, for
instance, curbside recycling costs from $625 a ton to more than $1,100 a
ton, depending on the area of the city;  from that fee, the city can deduct
about $110 a ton in sales and the $38 a ton it would have paid the
landfill.

Generally speaking, landfill "tipping fees," the price of depositing
debris, have to be more than $50 a ton - compared to a national average of
$30 and a median of around $15 - to make recycling economically competitive
for most materials.

There are, however, notable exceptions.  More steel is recycled in the
United States than any other material.  Scrap metal dealers and steel
minimills, not government mandates, drive this profitable recycling.

Aluminum cans fetch $900 a ton on the open market, and more than half of
empty cans are recycled; the first major aluminum recycling plants opened
in 1904.  The reason is simple: It takes only 5 percent as much electricity
to produce aluminum from old beverage cans as it does from bauxite ore.
And electricity is the major cost in making aluminum.  "Aluminum recycling
exists today as a viable industry not because the aluminum industry is
interested in saving landfill space, but because it has had a variety of
economic motivations to recycle aluminum," write Jennifer Gitlitz and Paul
Relis in a report summarizing a 1988 California recycling conference.

---

Once states make people recycle materials for which the cost of recycling
is greater than the recovered value, officials have to figure out who will
pay for the difference.  Certainly, Dick Pence doesn't plan to absorb the
total cost of complying with Ohio's mandate.  If he had to, he'd go out of
business.  Improving the economics of recycling, to would-be materials
planners, requires more new laws and more regulations.

In some cases, the laws seek to create bigger markets for all the
near-worthless stuff collected.  Old newspapers - which make up about 7
percent of a typical city's solid-waste stream - are a particular problem.
They would be cheaper to dump.  But to build a resale market, California,
Conneticut, maryland, Missouri, and Wisconsin have passed laws requiring
publishers to increase their use of recycled newsprint.  Similar laws have
been proposed in Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.

Beginning January 1, 1994, the District of Columbia will require anyone who
distributes within the district a publication with a circulation of more
than 30,000 or who sells more than 500 tons or $100,000 of paper a year to
use only recycled paper.  Only if the company can prove that using recycled
paper would increase its paper costs more than 10 percent over virgin stock
can it apply for an exemption.  In deeming a 10-percent higher price
"competitive" with virgin paper, "They don't understand that huge newspaper
deals are made on the basis of a fraction of a percent," says Jack Schafer,
editor of the weekly 'City Paper,' which has a circulation of 89,000.  The
penalty for law breaking: a 15-percent "recycling surcharge" over the price
of the illegal paper.

The law also specifies just how much recycled material different kinds of
paper must contain: 50 percent for high-grade printing and writing paper;
40 percent for newsprint; 5 percent for facial tissues; 20 percent for
toilet paper; 30 percent for paper napkins; 40 percent for paper towels;
even 40 percent for doilies.  In many cases, the recycled material must be
"post-consumer," meaning that reusing factory scrap doesn't count.

The ordinance's content requirements "will stifle rather than encourage
recycling," says Carol Melamed, director of government affairs and
associate counsel for 'The Washington Post.'  The reason lies in the
technical and economic limits of paper making.  The mills that can produce
recycled paper with 40-percent old newspaper stock are mills that were
built originally to make recycled paper.  But more and more virgin-paper
mills want to get into the recycled-paper business.  Rather than build an
entirely new plant, at a cost of some $400 million, they add a deinking
line, which costs $30 million to $50 million; this retrofitting lets them
make paper with between 15 percent and 25 percent recycled content.  That
may not meet D.C.'s lofty goals, but its impact on the waste stream is
significant.

Before the law was passed, the Bear Island mill in Virginia - which
produces paper for the 'Post,' 'The Washington Times,' and other local
newspapers - had plans to add a deinking line that would have absorbed
60,000 tons of old newsprint a year.  But the recycled paper produced at
Bear Island would have contained only 20 percent recycled content.  Since
the D.C. ordinance would wipe out the market for its recycled paper, the
mill has indefinitely postponed adding the new capacity.

Both content mandates and product bans can become vehicles for favoring
some corporations or industries over others.  Diaper services have lobbied
heavily for bans on disposables.  And paper interests have had some notable
success in their decades-long struggle to beat out plastic - McDonnald's
switch, for instance, and a Maine law requiring retailers to use paper bags
unless the customer requests a plastic bag.  "Within a week of passage of
that law, virtually all the orders for retail-store plastic bags were
canceled if they were active, and if they were under consideration, they
were rejected," says George A. Makrauer, president and chief executive of
Amko Plastics Inc., a bag manufacturer.

Oddly enough, one way for plastics makers to fight back is to support
content requirements like D.C.'s.  With their emphasis on "post-consumer"
content, such requirements raise paper costs.  They also strip the
"recycled" label from paper that contains factory scrap.  Like orange-juice
makers selling peels, both paper and plastic makers reuse their wastes -
usually by putting them back through the production process.  Paper
manufacturers have long touted such paper as "recycled," while plastic
manufacturers haven't capitalized on the label.

Even within a single industry, bans and mandates get tangled up with
corporate opportunism.  Conservatree Paper Co., a distributor of
post-consumer recycled paper, is a prominent lobbyist for laws that would
mandate recycled content and forbid using the term "recycled" to describe
paper made with factory scrap.  Laws like D.C.'s increase the market for
the paper Conservatree distributes.  Mandates that lead paper manufactures
to invest in more recycling capacity should increase Conservatree's
supplies - and the competition for its business - and lower its costs.

Although the company mantains its innocence - "once the E.P.A. or Congress
adopts our proposal, we will no longer have a corner on the market of
selling honest-to-goodness recycled paper" - it's hard to believe that it
doesn't recognize the advantages of having already established a beachhead
in the market.  None of this is to say that Conservatree's managers aren't
motivated by a zeal for recycling, only that they also stand to gain
financially by seeing their ideas made law.

Similarly, paper companies that invest in deinking plants and other
recycling facilities develop a vested interest in recycled paper.  Despite
a virgin-paper glut, Champion International, for instance, is puring some
$80 million into new plant capacity - to make recycled paper.  Behind this
curious investment: the company's expectation of more laws mandating
recycled paper content and recycled-paper use.  If it guesses right,
Champion will have a jump on the competition.  If the mandate mania fades,
we may find Chamion lobbying for new laws to protect its investment.

---

The most grandiose plans to regulate materials involve something called
"Advance disposal fees."  Although these fees would require central
planning on a scale unknown in this country since World War II, their
proponents speak the language of markets, and some of them probably believe
their own rhetoric.

The idea behind ADFs is that garbage represents a market failure.
Manufacturers don't consider the costs of disposal when they make products.
In theory, then, the government could charge manufacturers ADFs that would
take into account such factors as: the actual collection and disposal costs
in each different jurisdiction where a product is thrown away; current
recycling rates; the actual length of product use per household; the actual
consumption and disposal path of each product by household; recycling and
other behavior in respone to new charges, which would change the cost
picture over time.  One ADF scheme envisions using bar-coded information on
each product to create a national database that would be used to regulate
charges.

So far, such an elaborate system has yet to become a bill, much less a law.
But more stylized ADFs have been enacted.  In late 1992, Florida will begin
imposing fees on packaging materials that aren't recycled at a 50-percent
rate.  Rhode Island has introduced ADFs on items, such as tires and motor
oil, that are difficult to dispose of.  And in New Jersey, the governor's
Solid Waste Task Force has recommended a pre-disposal fee to be assessed on
manufacturers when they use virgin materials.

California Assemblyman Byron Sher has introduced a bill to tax materials
used for packaging and nondurable goods unless their scrap values cover
recycling costs.  The bill draws its "raison d'etre" from the 1989 law -
also sponsored by Sher - that created the mandatory waste-reduction
targets: "The costs of implementing the Act to local government, waste
haulers and others are significant and should be borne by generators and
disposers of solid waste."

Under the Sher bill, the California Integrated Waste Management Board would
levy "recycling incentive fees" equal to *at least* the difference between
the scrap value of an item and the average cost of collection and
processing it for recycling, plus a "reasonable return" to companies that
do the work.  Suppose it costs an average of $100 a ton to run curbside
recycling for newspapers, and the newspapers fetch $10 a ton on the resale
market.  Allowing for a 5-percent markup on the $90 net cost, the advance
disposal fee would be $94.50 a ton - or 2.4 cents for a half-pound 'Los
Angeles Times.'  If that tax isn't high enough to cut down on newspaper
production, the board is supposed to raise it.

The Sher system illustrates a typical planning dilemma.  Since it would be
too complicated to trace the actual recycling costs of individual items, it
uses state averages.  Without this simplification, the program would be
impossible to operate.  With it, however, the price signals are completely
distorted.  Consumers who live in places where recycling is cheap will pay
too much for products. Those who live in places where recycling is
expensive will pay too little.  And the program leaves plenty of discretion
altogether outside the market:  A state board decides when the fees are
high enough and gets to compute the reasonable rate of return due
recyclers.

The Sher bill, like many such schemes, represents not a "true cost" system
but an elaborate way to subsidize recycling.  It seeks to penalize
materials not vecause they actually harm the environment (by, for instance,
releasing toxic gases) but because they can't be affordably recycled.  The
bill's backers speak the lanuage of economics, but they don't understand
it.

---

The basic problem with such schemes is that they start from a false
premise.  There is no market failure in solid waste.  The economist will
find no externalities in your garbage can, unless government subsidies put
them there.  But that doesn't mean there are no problems.

Take landfills.  They really are closing.  In fact, more than half the
18,500 landfills that existed in 1979 have shut down in the past 10 years.
This is nothing new.  Landfills have always had limited lifespans, usually
about 10 years.  What is new is that the old landfills aren't being
replaced.  The number of new landfills built from 1985 to 1990 was almost
50 percent lower than during the previous five years, the lowest level in
20 years.  New landfills are much larger than old ones, but not large
enough to make up the difference.  As a result, it's hard to find space for
trash.  In a mini-version of the garbage barge, Santa Monica's trash
haulers drive around in their trucks, calling each other on cellular phones
to find out who's open to take their loads.

The cause of the landfill shortage isn't that we're "running out of space."
A. Clark Wiseman, in a Resources for the Future study, calculates that "all
municipal solid waste for the next thousand years would require [a landfill
120 feet deep in] a square area having 44-mile length sides."  In other
words, a hypothetical landfill that could accommodate the next 1,000 years
of U.S. waste would take up less than 0.1 percent of the continental United
States.

What's missing isn't land - it's prices.  Cities used to be able to shove
landfills anywhere they wanted.  When surrounding communities rebelled,
using lawsuits and environmental regulations to drag out the siting
process, solid-waste managers griped about the NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard)
syndrome and environmentalists declared landfills (and incinerators)
remnants of a passing age of waste.

But entrepreneurs have found a way around NIMBY.  It's called YIMBY-FAP:
Yes, in my backyard - for a price.  This new approach has two components.
First, the landfill developer picks up the full costs of protecting the
surrounding community from environmental harm.  This includes such
technical components as double landfill liners and leachate collection
systems (to protect groundwater from the gop produced by decaying garbage)
and methane-removal systems (to keep gass from building up underground).
It also includes inspections, record-keeping, a detailed closing plan, and
various monitoring systems.

Robert T. Glebs, a former city waste manager who now runs a business
siting landfills, estimates that such a state-of-the-art landfill would
cost about $55 million to build in the Midwest - including such additional
costs as running local recycling programs and offering financial guarantees
of local property values.  Adding in a 25-percent pargin - profit for
private landfills, replacement cost for public ones - the tipping fee to
cover such a landfill comes to $25.62 a ton, way, way below the cost of
recycling programs.

The second component of a YIMBY-FAP landfill is to share the wealth - to
pay the surrounding community.  Charles County, Virginia, for instance,
collects $5.00 for each ton of garbage dumped in the landfill Chambers
Development Co. runs in the rural county.  Chambers also picks up local
garbage for free.  "We're good capitalists; we realized there was money in
garbage," county Administrator Fred Darden told 'Forbes.'  Thanks to the
landfill, the county collects more than $1 million a year, enough to cut
property taxes by 20 percent while spending more on local schools.  Such
"host community fees" make landfill sitting a win-win proposition.

They also bring the full cost of landfills into the marketplace by making
the landfill operator pay not only to install safety measures but to
compensate the people most directly affected by the landfill.  The next
step to internalizing garbage costs is to bring landfill costs back to the
person with the bag full of trash.

---

That means getting rid of free garbage service - the subsidy at the root of
the "solid waste crisis."  And it probably means charging more to people
who generate more trash.

Cities like to give people free garbage service.  Suggesting that Los
Angeles might charge for trash, political wisdom has it, brough down mayor
Sam Yorty.  In a 1990 survey of 246 U.S. cities - ranging from 5,000 to
1.75 million in population - more than one-third didn't charge any fees for
garbage collection.  Of those that did, about half charged flat rates,
regardless of how much trash residents generated.

Now it is *possible* that a private trash collector paying full freight to
a YIMBY-FAP landfill might charge all customers a flat fee for garbage
pickup.  But it isn't very likely.  What seems more realistic is a system
something like the one MCO Re-Cycling devised for Freeport, Illinois.  For
$5.75 a month, residents get weekly pickup of one 30-gallon bag of garbage
and unlimited recyclables.  For 60 cents, they can buy a sticker good for
another bag of trash; the average household uses about one sticker a month.
Customers have an incentive to reduce, reuse, and recycle, but they also
have a choice.  And, in contrast to ADF schemes, this system allows prices
to be set by people who actually know what the costs of garbage are.

Unlike most city-run recycling programs, MCO uses a single truck for both
garbage and recyclables, picking both up at the same time.  That saves on
the extra trips that make recycling costs prohibitive most places.
Customers don't have to hang on to their bottles and cans forever and don't
have to sort everything into a million different bins.  "All we ask is that
the stuff be clean," says MCO owner Bernard Mrugula.  Though it's too early
to be sure (the program is less than a year old, and trash composition
swings wildly from month to month), the percentage of trash that gets
recycled seems to be on an upward trend - hitting 23.7 percent in April.

Mrugula clearly hates to see any good stuff go to waste; he sounds
genuinely stricken at the thought of the television sets they had to dump
last "spring cleaning" without stripping them of valuable metal.  He is a
resource recovery enthusiast, but he thinks recycling promoters are often
unrealistic about how much people have to recycle.  "There's not a lot
there," he says, "and we're getting darn near all of it."

Mrugula understands what the materials czars and a lot of city managers
miss: Recycling is simply another way to get rid of trash.  To make it
work, you have to make it easy on the customer and treat it as part of
regular garbage pickup.  Efficiency, not suffering, not a war on
consumption, is the name of the game.

Looking through a nation's garbage, you can tell much about its people -
how much they read, whether they're too poor to own refrigerators or rich
enough to buy microwave ovens, whether they prefer gardening or fixing
their cars.  You can figure out how much their time is worth and whether
they have a lot of kids.  Bit it's hard, very hard, to see how everything
fits together - how a Uneeda cracker box, resealable and lined with wax
paper, could lead to national brands and mass marketing, how disposable
diapers could make small-scale day care more feasible, how floppy disks
could produce more paper waste.

Facing a solid-waste crisis, we have a choice.  We can manage our garbage,
getting rid of the barriers that keep people from seeing what their habits
cost.  Or we can assume omniscience and, thinking we know everything about
the intricate connections between people and materials, we can try to
manipulate both.  If we choose the latter course, we will run into the old
planner's problem.  We just won't know enough to do the job.  Garbage in,
garbage out.

---

Virginia I. Postrel is editor of 'Reason.'  Lynn Scarlett is vice president
for research of the Reason Foundation and the author of several studies on
solid-waste issues.