The durable myth of recycling = efficiency

By way of Tim Blair, a link to the article in which John Tierney declared himself a target for hate mail from schoolchildren, environmentalists, and municipal workers by pointing out the origins and true costs of the recycling hoax:

Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense — for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there's no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there's no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren't good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups — politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations — while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.

The obvious temptation is to blame journalists, who did a remarkable job of creating the garbage crisis, often at considerable expense to their own employers. Newspaper and magazine publishers, whose products are a major component of municipal landfills, nobly led the crusade against trash, and they're paying for it now through regulations that force them to buy recycled paper — a costly handicap in their struggle against electronic rivals. It's the first time that an industry has conducted a mass-media campaign informing customers that its own product is a menace to society.

I've always had my doubts about the modern recycling movement . . . and how it seems to have become more a replacement religion than an economic or even environmental concern. I knew the stated economics were dodgy, in that it seemed that the claimed benefits from recycling more and more "stuff" seemed ever smaller, while the actual costs clearly were growing. People now recycle as a moral imperative much more than as an economic necessity, and municipal governments everywhere are just as trapped in a no-win situation as J. Winston Porter (the former US government official who set the ball in motion back in 1988):

"People in New York and other places are tilting at recycling windmills," says Porter, who left the E.P.A. in 1989 and is now president of a consulting firm, the Waste Policy Center in Leesburg, Va. "There aren't many more materials in garbage that are worth recycling." Porter has been advising cities and states to abandon their unrealistic goals, but politicians are terrified of coming out against recycling. How could they explain it to the voters? How could they explain it to their children?

Indeed, how do you gracefully admit that you've brainwashed an entire generation with nice-sounding nonsense? The scariest thing is that this article was published in 1996! Not only has nothing changed, but things have gotten worse, as more municipalities have insisted on moving further and further in a pro-recycling direction.