The Government's War on Recycling The Government's War on Recycling by Charles Oliver Governments may be the biggest obstacle to increasing our reliance on recycled products. G overnment at all levels is doing everything it can to encourage and even require recycling.
Environmentalists charge that many government rules actually discourage recycling.
And some free-market economists agree with them. As more governments debate recycling laws, the chance for these laws working at cross-purposes with other statutes increases dramatically. Even as one law, for instance, mandates the use of recycled material in some product, another forbids used content in some other good. And even as one agency enacts rules to artificially create a market for recycled goods, another enacts rules that tend to stamp out such markets. Government rule books are full of laws that give virgin materials an advantage over recycled ones, claims Alexander Volokh, an assistant policy analyst at the libertarian Reason Foundation.