Munger makes the same mistake that Tierney does by focusing on something that's easy to attack, and sounds good on the face, but is in fact nearly irrelevant to the discussion.
Tierney's argument that it takes energy to recycle is completely moot; the point isn't energy at all, the point is to recover materials & to slow production and consumption of wasteful single use containers. Combine that with our ability to use abundant and unending solar power, and you can see that Tierney's assumption that energy is part of the economy of recycling is a straw man and doesn't stand up to reason or reality.
Munger's entire argument is that recycling is expensive, there's a cost to recycling. Like Tierney, this is a misdirection. Cost is not the point of recycling. He's right, there's a cost, but he doesn't compare it to anything. What's the alternative to recycling, and how much does that cost? There's a cost to landfills too -- how much does it cost to throw away? Munger ignores the long term costs of not recycling. Running out of resources is going to be a lot more expensive than recycling. The byproducts of plastic production are toxic, and historically there have been some plastic factories that made workers fatally sick. Munger didn't try to factor in the health care costs of people who work in or live near factories. He hasn't attempted to consider the heavy cost of pollution. He doesn't calculate the costs of transporting garbage. He hasn't attempted to calculate the environmental costs of not recycling at all -- and this is the entire point of recycling, the entire basis upon which the economics of recycling is evaluated. The recycling movement is not even remotely concerned about the transaction price of recycling a bottle, it's concerned with slowing our frivolous and wasteful use of this planet's finite and valuable resources on one time deliveries of 12 ounces of Coke.
There's a lot of information on the many large costs of not recycling that Munger is deliberately ignoring, here's just one:
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/dangers-of-p...
Thinking about cost alone is a persuasion strategy, it's a way to manipulate the argument and the audience, it's a way to put something seemingly tactile on the perceived downsides of recycling. It's a way to convince you that you're being cheated out of money -- but he's the one trying to trick you -- don't let it work on you so easily!
If nothing else, if I haven't convinced you at all, at least Google all the articles you can on the critiques of Teirney and Munger, read them all and try to rebut them yourself.