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The Recycling Myth

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Re: The Recycling Myth

#21

Post by barrkel »

gaius wrote: post #20
barrkel wrote: post #18

> The structure works the way all centrally planned structures work: it increases and centralizes power while the attempted (expected) results do not materialize I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front. Central planning has never achieved an expected result? There was never a successful corporation? Nor a military operation? Really? If you're going to be an ide…

Errm, actually (modern) militaries are highly decentralized. The corporal on the ground has a great deal of latitude and is expected to show initiative and creativity. Contrast that with the highly centralized militaries of WW1 - the attempted result wasn't "get bogged down for 4 years while our troops are mass-slaughtered".

I think you've missed my point. The article writer made a ridiculously strong claim: that no centralized structure ever worked. Only a single counterexample is needed to show that this is a dodgy claim, but counterexamples to this aren't rare, they're abundant. In particular, any time the efficiency costs of centralization are less than the transaction costs of decentralized parts cooperating, centralization is a win. There's a reason we've evolved brains.

Coming up with examples where decentralization beat centralization, on the other hand, proves nothing.

Re: The Recycling Myth

#22

Post by camccann »

barrkel wrote: post #18

> The structure works the way all centrally planned structures work: it increases and centralizes power while the attempted (expected) results do not materialize I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front. Central planning has never achieved an expected result? There was never a successful corporation? Nor a military operation? Really? If you're going to be an ide…

I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front.

Why is this? Most people, myself included, have at least a few "ridiculous biases" in their heads. I find it much easier to take an argument seriously when the biases are obvious. I may quickly decide that the argument is wrong, but at least I can make that decision.

Someone as far out into the ideological fringe as this article is going to be making a skewed argument no matter what. Would you really prefer that they did it in such a way that you never noticed the bias?

Re: The Recycling Myth

#23

Post by barrkel »

camccann wrote: post #22
barrkel wrote: post #18

> The structure works the way all centrally planned structures work: it increases and centralizes power while the attempted (expected) results do not materialize I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front. Central planning has never achieved an expected result? There was never a successful corporation? Nor a military operation? Really? If you're going to be an ide…

I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front. Why is this? Most people, myself included, have at least a few "ridiculous biases" in their heads. I find it much easier to take an argument seriously when the biases are obvious. I may quickly decide that the argument is wrong , but at least I can make that decision. Someone as far out into the ideological fringe as thi…

Well, there's ridiculous biases, and then there's ridiculous biases.

It's a matter of degree. Economics is a discipline which is all too susceptible to story-telling. Given a bias, almost any situation can be argued one way or the other by telling the appropriate story, and emphasising and underemphasising the various elements. So overt bias tends to lead me to suspect any given tale of economics likely has relatively little information and won't sound nearly as decisive if the sources are investigated. Making this decision to discount on the basis of evidence of bias is much cheaper than actually investigating the sources, of course; instead, I'll reserve such investigation for those stories which seem interesting but don't have obvious bias.

And in this case, the bias is extremely blatant and very silly. The author has stated right up front that there is only one way they could possibly tell the story they're going to tell, it can only end up one way, and they have no motivation to look for counterexamples.

In fact, the story may have some truth, may be a lot of truth, but the bias and the ease of manipulative storytelling in the discipline tell me that it's not worth my time investigating deeper. FWIW, I object to moralistic, almost religious, edicts to recycle. I'd much rather pay someone else to handle that problem. So I'm even on the side of the author's end goal; but I have no respect for the author's tale.

Re: The Recycling Myth

#24

Post by camccann »

xcombinator wrote: post #5

Typical american mindset: Everything is money. Use something, throwaway when don't needed, bury it, contaminate the soil, the seas, it's cheaper. Of course they are external cost to recycle, what he doesn't say is that THEY ARE EXTERNAL COST TO NOT RECYCLING. Nature knows that since long long ago, she recycles everything. The Pacific is filled with polymers just because people love to use plastics and don't recycle t…

There's an external cost (or benefit) to everything. Fully calculating the impact of a given action on everyone else would be absurdly computationally intractable, particularly for extremely diffuse or probabilistic effects. So, the question to ask must be not "what are the externalities of this action", but "what externalities are significant enough to take into account"?

The author of the article is concentrating on obvious costs felt independently by individuals, and ignoring diffuse non-economic benefits (such as... not accumulating huge piles of trash filled with difficult-to-recover resources). He's quite possibly correct anyway that it's a poor trade-off, or that it's at least poorly implemented, but he really isn't making a persuasive case, especially given the lack of any actual non-anecdotal evidence of what the costs and benefits are.

Re: The Recycling Myth

#25

Post by marknutter »

proemeth wrote: post #12
theschwa wrote: post #4

The title really should be "The Myth of Forced Recycling" I guarantee you there are efficient and even profitable ways to recycle, but those not only don't require the use of force but will be made less efficient by its presence. That being said... Why is this on HN? I would prefer to keep more political topics off of here. Mises.org has some really good technology and Intellectual Property right related articles, bu…

This is more economic than politic. The government creates an incentive to sort garbage, which should lead to new businesses creation and better overall management of garbage/recycling. The article suggests that people have to sort their garbage themselves, but they could pay someone to do it for them. This is similar to carbon taxes philosophy, create an incentive by making consumers bear the cost of inefficiencies,…

> The government creates an incentive to sort garbage, which should lead to new businesses creation and better overall management of garbage/recycling.

Either way, citizens will be forced to pay these new businesses to do this task, and most will probably still continue to do it themselves to save money. This recycling program is basically a massive tax on the populace, hidden under the guise of environmentalism. Not to mention it's probably much more difficult to start a business in Sweden than here in the states. I would imagine the Swedish government would take issue with companies profiting off of government programs. That, or there's some other red-tape involved, otherwise we'd already see these garbage sorting companies in existence (it's the first thing I thought of too when I was reading the article).

Re: The Recycling Myth

#26

Post by marknutter »

wisty wrote: post #15

There's an easy solution. Put a deposit (tax) on bottles, that gets refunded when the bottle gets recycled. If it's worth a 10 cent "sin tax" for me to chuck a Cola bottle away, the that's my choice. If somebody can sort my garbage (because they really need the money, or they have a high-tech robot that can sort trash really well, or whatever else), then they win as well.

Turning an entire nation of people into homeless bottle collectors. Genius. Maybe everyone could get a government issued grocery cart too.

Re: The Recycling Myth

#27

Post by marknutter »

henrikschroder wrote: post #13
m_eiman wrote: post #6

I don't know which part of Sweden the author lives in, but it's apparently not my part. In our trash room here we have bins for glass (white/coloured), paper, batteries and garbage. Card board boxes and other "big" stuff (basically anything that isn't normal consumables) is left at the recycling station (and assuming you do that on your way to work and don't go once per item, the extra energy needed is next to nothin…

I also live in Sweden, and in all the places I've lived, recycling has always been optional. If you don't want to recycle anything, you can just throw everything in the general trash, and noone will know or complain or charge you extra for it. That said, I read an article many years ago by the head of our environmental protection agency, and he rightfully pointed out the externalizing of the cost of sorting on the po…

I've never understood why we recycle glass. It doesn't seem like the materials to make glass are in short supply. Is it just much more costly to gather them new than to melt down existing glass containers?

Re: The Recycling Myth

#28

Post by fauigerzigerk »

jacquesm wrote: post #8
soundsop wrote: post #3

The basic premise is that (in Sweden) the uncounted cost of cleaning and sorting waste and driving to dispose of it is greater than the savings due to recycling. It would have been nice to see at least an order-of-magnitude calculation estimating the uncounted cost. If the cost is so obviously greater than the savings of recycling, then a simple estimation should be sufficient. The author is probably right, but some…

Why is he 'probably right' without proof ? I remember when I was a kid that factories were paying for old paper and old glass. A whole generation made their pocket money that way. If it was worth something back then I would expect it to be worth something today.

I don't know if he is right. But I doubt that a completely manual sorting and cleaning process is the most efficient we can do. Sorting and cleaning waste industrially, using the right tools for the job, has to be better.

Also, there are numerous studies showing how much more efficient public transport is compared to people using their own cars. Now they make people drive waste bags around in their own cars. That has got to be a very bad idea.

Re: The Recycling Myth

#29

Post by yagiz »

parboman wrote: post #17
wisty wrote: post #15

There's an easy solution. Put a deposit (tax) on bottles, that gets refunded when the bottle gets recycled. If it's worth a 10 cent "sin tax" for me to chuck a Cola bottle away, the that's my choice. If somebody can sort my garbage (because they really need the money, or they have a high-tech robot that can sort trash really well, or whatever else), then they win as well.

this is already done in Sweden.

And in Turkey, for some bottles.

Re: The Recycling Myth

#30

Post by dreur »

parboman wrote: post #17
wisty wrote: post #15

There's an easy solution. Put a deposit (tax) on bottles, that gets refunded when the bottle gets recycled. If it's worth a 10 cent "sin tax" for me to chuck a Cola bottle away, the that's my choice. If somebody can sort my garbage (because they really need the money, or they have a high-tech robot that can sort trash really well, or whatever else), then they win as well.

this is already done in Sweden.

And in Canada
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