J. Pack. Set Technol. Vol.6 No.4 (1997)

特 別 講 演 会

要 旨
If Recycling Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

DrFrankAckerman*[Dr Ackerman is research professor at the Global Development and Environment Institute at
Tufts University, in Massachusetts, USA. This article is based on his most recent book, "WhyDo We Recycle? Markets, Values, and Public Policies," published earlier this yearby Island
Press, in Washington DC. He will be speaking in Tokyo on 7 March.]
What have you, personally, done to help the environment? Unless you are acommitted activist or work in an environmental profession, the answer is probablythat you have tried to make ecologically informed purchases, reduced (oreliminated) unnecessary trips in your automobile - and recycled your households o l i d w a s t e .
Recycling has become the universal environmental activity of the 1990s. In theUnited States, more than 7,000 municipal programs collect recyclable paper,packaging, and yard waste from households. More adults participate in recycling ona regular basis than vote for president. "Recycling," says journalist Jerry Powell, "ismore popular than democracy."In Europe, Germany's 1991 packaging ordinance has led to the collection andrecycling of more than two-thirds of the nation's used packaging, though at great
expense. Other European countries have modified the German approach in the hopeof achieving similar results at lower costs. Additional recycling initiatives haveapp eared in urban areas around th e wo rld .
Why do we recycle? It is a profitable activity only for relatively low-income people(and for a handful of specialized businesses). In the cities of developing countries,
countless scavengers pick over the waste found on the streets and in land fills,
pulling out anything of value in order to resell it. But as economies
grow and incomes rise, scavenging tends to disappear, displaced by higher-wage
occupations. Recycling as it occurs in developed countries is a different process,motivated by altruistic concerns for the community, the environment and the future
rather than by hope of personal economic gain.

The erratic economics of scrap markets
Recycling enjoys broad popular support, but there is no consensus about the benefits
it is expected to provide. Some people believe that recycling is saving money for
their municipality, by reducing the costs of garbage collection and disposal.
Analysis of U.S. recycling costs, however, suggests that only the best programs, suchas the one in Seattle, consistently save money for their communities. Average
programs save money in some years, but add to municipal costs at other times.
It is difficult to predict the "normal" costs of recycling, not only because there is wide
variation in the efficiency of local operations, but also because of the continualchanges in scrap prices. Recycling programs receive revenues from sellingrecovered materials in scrap markets, where prices fluctuate wildly. Some grades ofscrap paper sold for six to eight times as much in 1995 as in 1993, and then came
*Research Professor, Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University, Medford,
Massachusetts, U.S.A.

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If Recycling Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

crashing back down in 1996.
My estimate is that an average American recycling program would have reduced
municipal waste management costs by $5 per household in 1995 when scrap prices
were high, and increased municipal costs by $21 per household in 1993 when prices
were low. Efforts to improve the efficiency of recycling will of course continue -- but
so will the fluctuations in scrap prices, frustrating any attempt at a precise analysis
of costs and benefits.

The vanishing landfill crisis
Another popular reason for recycling is the perceived lack of land fill space, and thefear that there will soon be nowhere left to put our garbage. Five to ten years ago, it
was commonly believed that the United States faced a "landfill crisis." Many
landfills were closing, while few were opening; no one wanted to live near a dump.
The future of traditional waste management was generally agreed to be bleak.
For some densely populated parts of the world, a shortage of land fill space is areality today -- but in most of America, the crisis never arrived. The few new
landfills that opened were huge, while most of the old ones that closed were small.
As a result, available landfill capacity increased in some regions of the country.
It is reasonable to worry about the environmental implications of discarding andburying useful materials in our trash. But that long- term concern is not the same as
an immediate landfill problem. A misplaced air of crisis may make it harder tounderstand the underlying issues, just as in the "energy crisis" of the 1970s, when
panic over a fictitious short-term scarcity of gasoline obscured the real long-term
dilemmas about the sources and uses of energy.

Materials, manufacturing, and health hazards
There is still an important meaning and value to recycling, even in the absence of aland fill crisis or an immediate opportunity for profit. Waste disposal is not thewhole story; a stronger case for recycling rests on its benefits in resource use andmanufacturing. The products that consumers buy and discard are made byindustry, and the process of manufacturing most goods has far greater
environmental impacts - for example, much greater toxic emissions ~ than disposalof the same things in modern land fills. Recycling is good for the environment
because making almost anything out of recycled material causes lower industrial
emissions than making the same thing out of virgin material. Using less stuff in thefirst place is even better for the environment than recycling.
Recycling and waste reduction are also important because they minimize the use ofirreplaceable natural resources. The future for the paper industry can be madesecure because its raw material - mainly trees - is renewable, can be grown insustainable, carefully managed tree plantations and its product is recyclable. Metals
cannot be grown; burying them in landfills reduces the useable supply of metals forfuture generations. Plastics, interestingly enough, could be made on a sustainablebasis from renewable biomass (plant) materials, but so far this process has remainedprohibitively expensive. Today's plastics, of course, are made from nonrenewablefossil fuels and production of fast-food packaging may not be the highest-value use- 222 -

J. Pack. Sci. Tcchnol. Vol.6 No.4 (1997)of the world's finite supply of petroleum.
Which production processes are worst for the environment? I directed a three-year
study that performed a life-cycle analysis of the leading packaging materials used in
the U.S.; similar studies have been done in other countries. We found that
production of one common material caused by far the greatest toxic emissions, per
ton of output: polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Several of the chlorinated organic
compounds released during PVC production are known to be human carcinogens.
Production of most other common materials, including the other leading plastics,
results in much smaller quantities of hazardous emissions.

Waste reduction: when less is moreAmong materials other than PVC, we found a simple pattern: the best choice for theenvironment is almost always the lightest-weight one. In some cases this is a matterof common sense. When the same food can be bought with differing amounts ofpackaging, the environmentally best option is the one with the least packaging perunit of food. In other cases the choice is less obvious.
For example, although glass has a clean image and is easily recycled, it is also heavy.
A glass bottle containing juice weighs about ten times as much as a plastic bottle orpaperboard carton containing the same amount of juice. If the glass bottle is used
only once before it is discarded or recycled, then it is worse for the environment thanone of the lighter-weight alternatives. (We reached this conclusion only forsingle-use glass bottles. It does not necessarily hold when reusable bottles arerepeatedly returned to the bottler, washed, and refilled - as is still common for beerand soft drinks in many countries, but almost unknown in the U.S. today. Refillable
glass bottles can be the environmentally preferred choice if return rates are high anda v e r a g e d is t a n c e s t o b o t t l in g p la n t s a r e s h o r t . )Of course, the choice of packaging is never made on environmental grounds alone.
Although one package may be environmentally preferable, another may be easier tohold, drink from, reseal, etc. In practice, trade-offs will inevitably be made between
what is best for the environment and what is most convenient for the consumer.
It is also true that making almost anything from recycled materials is better thanusing the same amount of virgin materials. Making recycled aluminum from oldbeverage cans uses only 5% as much energy as making new aluminum from bauxite,
and avoids most of the pollutant emissions that accompany virgin production. The
benefits from recycling other materials are not quite as dramatic, but are still
important. If glass bottles are being used, it is desirable to make them from recycled
glass. However, the environmental savings quickly vanish if heavier, recyclable
products replace lighter-weight, nonrecyclable ones.
In the case of food packaging, for safety and hygiene reasons it is generally not
permissible to use recycled paper and plastic materials for food contact purposes.
But closing the loop (i.e. using recycled material to make the same product again) is
no more environmentally desirable than open loop recycling (i.e. using recycledmaterial to make another product). What is important is that recycled material
replaces the environmentally more damaging use of virgin material somewhere in
the economy, not that it returns to the same industry or product line.

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If Recycling Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

Can the market be wrong?
Recycling, American style, conserves materials and reduces the environmental
impacts of manufacturing. However, as estimated above, an average American
recycling program is cheaper than traditional waste disposal only when scrap prices
are highest. At other times, it is slightly more expensive than burying everything ina land fill. So without public initiatives, the private sector would not do much
recycling, since it would not find recovery of most household materials to be reliablyprofitable.
Does this mean that recycling is a bad idea? The increasingly cost-conscious debates
about public policy often suggest that the free market is never wrong, and that
programs such as recycling should be pursued only to the extent that they can savemoney. But this pessimistic conclusion misses the real reasons for recycling. In fact,
recycling is an attempt to answer at least three questions that the market rarelyarticulates.
First, what new technologies will emerge and become profitable when there is publicpressure to reduce, reuse and recycle the material goods that we buy? The
techniques of production that are profitable today evolved over the last century, in acontext of cheap, often publicly subsidized, virgin raw materials. Policies that pushindustry in the opposite direction will, over time, lead to a different set ofproduction techniques and a different calculation of profitability. The point is not toreject the market, but to consciously choose the environmental context within which
the market will operate. Environmental clean-up services are a fast-growing
industry, as a result of the environmental concerns, policies and regulations of thelast 25 years. Industries based on recycling may come to prosper as well, for similarreasons.
Second, what provision should we make for the material welfare of future
generations? Economic techniques such as cost-benefit analysis are designed toweigh the interests of people who are alive today. Since our obligation to unborn
future generations is not expressed in the market, it is not reflected in current prices,
costs, and benefits. Yet it is clear that many people care about leaving a liveable
world for our descendants. Recycling is in part an attempt to conserve materials forthe future, even if they appear cheap enough to waste freely at present.
Third, how should we describe and respect the value of nature? Air and waterpollution, and many other forms of environmental degradation, cause a harm thathas no price － they diminish something whose worth was never expressed inmonetary terms. Economists have proposed methods for assigning prices toenvironmental damages, but this has remained largely a theoretical endeavor. Evenin theory, pricing the environment may miss the point: the things we care mostabout, such as love, religion, our natural and cultural heritage, are inherently
priceless; they have a dignity rather than a price. Recycling is a small step toward amore dignified future.

Conclusion: toward sustainability
While recycling raises sweeping questions about the environment and the future, italso remains firmly anchored in the daily realities of collection trucks, processing-224-

J. Pack. Sci. Technol Vol.6 No.4 (1997)

plants and local budgets. Although immediate profits or losses should not be theonly criterion for judging a recycling program, neither should they be ignored.
Budgets will always be limited, and it will always be worthwhile to try to makerecycling more cost-effective, to do as much as possible with the resources that area v a i l a b l e .
Remember that recycling addresses long-term environmental goals, not animmediate crisis. Thus it is not necessary, nor is it technically feasible, to recycle
everything in the municipal waste stream. Some things remain prohibitively
expensive to recycle, and efforts should be concentrated elsewhere. Clarity about
the goals of recycling should make it possible to set priorities, selecting areas where
the greatest quantities of useful materials can be conserved or recovered, and thegreatest environmental gains achieved, at the lowest cost.
Clarity about the goals of recycling also leads to the conclusion that waste reduction
can be an even better route to the same destination. When the pursuit of waste
reduction and of recycling point to different choices, as in the case of juicecontainers, the former is often better for the environment. The objectives that
motivate recycling can sometimes be best advanced by minimizing material use,rather than by maximizing recycling. Just as energy conservation is often a cheaperand cleaner alternative to new energy supplies, waste reduction can be a cheaperand cleaner alternative to new waste management services.
In the end, recycling makes a modest but valuable contribution to the creation of anenvironmentally sustainable future. It is far from being the most urgent
environmental policy initiative under discussion today; it is distinguished by being
the most accessible step for millions of people to take in the course of their daily
lives. Recycling is the answer to several important questions, including the one that
opened this article. What can you, personally, do to help the environment?
（この内容は1997年3月7日、京橋会館(東京)に於て開催された日本包装学会特別講演会の要旨です。）- 225 -