QotD: The terrible economics of (most) recycling effortshttps://quotulatiousness.ca/blog/2026/04/30/qotd-the-terrible-economics-of-most-recycling-efforts/New York City confidently predicted that it would save money by starting a mandatory recycling program in 1992, but it took so much extra labor to collect and process the recyclables that the city couldn’t recoup the costs from selling the materials. In fact, the recyclables often had so little value that the city had to pay still more money to get rid of them. The recycling program cost the city more than $500 million during its first seven years, and the losses have continued to mount. A new study by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute shows that eliminating the city’s recycling program and sending all its municipal trash to landfills could now save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually — enough money to increase the parks department’s budget by at least half.
Even those calculations underestimate the cost of recycling because they include only the direct outlays, chiefly the $686 per ton that the city spends to collect recyclables. But what about all the valuable time that New Yorkers spend sorting and rinsing their trash and delivering it to the recycling bin? ...
Enviro-crazies won't think beyond, "I can do it," to ask, "But is it practical?" They won't see that if you increase the supply of a commodity without a corresponding increase in demand, the costliest supplier will suffer. With aluminum, recycled aluminum is competitive. With recycled paper and plastics, the recycled products are not cost-competitive (and in some cases, of lower quality and utility).
