Nor are we running out of room for garbage. Professor A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., calculated that if Americans continue generating garbage at current rates, it would take 1,000 years before the total refuse pile would fill an area 35 miles square and 100 yards deep. Given today's stringent regulations on landfills, it could then safely be covered over and used for parkland. No it's not practical to create a national trash heap, but considering America's 3 million plus square miles of territory and its vast areas of wilderness, it's clear this is hardly a tall order to fill. First there are the costs involved.
Many larger jurisdictions spend millions of dollars a year on their recycling programs.
Picking up a ton of recyclables, forget the expense of processing it, can cost three times as much as picking up the same amount of garbage. Then there's the pollution created by recycling. That's right, pollution. And not just by the trucks transporting the material. As public policy analyst and recycling expert James DeLong has noted, recycling is a manufacturing process.