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So says Tim Worstall. Also a previous post ‘Recycling Rubbish‘.
As I see it the flaw in Tim’s argument is that he measures everything in economic terms. Call me old fashioned, but perhaps there are some things in life that cannot be measured by their monetary value.
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posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 11:45 am. Click here to read all of the latest posts.
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Of course there are things that cannot be valued by money or money alone. I’d actually argue that most things can’t be valued by money alone.
However, recycling isn’t one of them.
The argument in favour of recycling is that we must save resources. Reuse them rather than taking new virgin product.
Fine, when we make the decision about whether to do that we need to look at all of the resources we use in that process.
Sometimes recycling makes clear and obvious sense: that 6 month old Ferrari isn’t going to get junked just because it no longer matches the owner’s fingernail polish. It will be sold, second hand, to someone else to reuse.
But we do need to have a method of working out whether a specific piece of recycling is worthwhile. We do have such a method, called a cost benefit analysis. Add up all of the costs of a course of action (and add in non-monetary values as best you can, this isn’t 100% accurate) and all of the benefits and see which is greater. The costs or the benefits?
If the costs are greater, we make ourselves poorer by doing it. If the benefits greater, we make ourselves richer.
It’s important to point out that economists do indeed try very hard to incorporate non-monetary items into these calculations. Clean air, a beautiful view and so on. They then get converted into money simply because we need to have one single measure so that we can actually make our comparison.
Phew. Right, my major point, and it’s a bit of a bugbear this week, the bee in my bonnet at the moment, is that when we make these cost benefit analyses about recycling of domestic rubbish we are not including the time taken to sort the rubbish. Which we should do.
Tim – thanks for taking the time to reply.
I see your point, but I still wonder who decides what value can be placed on (for instance) the wellbeing of future generations who will have to cope with all of the square miles of landfill we will have left behind.
If nothing else (and I believe there is a lot else) I’d say it is worth the £1.67 (maths David) £1.25 (ish) cost to ourselves of our time every week to get ourselves into the way of thinking ‘Can this item I am throwing away be reused?’ Otherwise, assuming our consumption goes up and more and more residents of the planet consume at a rate approaching ours surely things can only get worse and worse?
Sorry, probably not very well articulated. That is why I draw pictures.
As an aside I did find the article you linked to on the subject quite dubious. Quotes such as:
“rather than running out of space, overall capacity is growing. “In fact,” he says, “the United States today has more landfill capacity than ever before.”"
and…
“Today more petroleum reserves are being discovered than are being used up.”
I just don’t think I believe it.
I don’t buy it either. And as for US landfill capacity, we need at least 58.6% of it for affordable housing development, which will require even more landfill capacity. So you see there isn’t that much capacity here after all. Try Inner Mongolia.
