Recycling is up at UW and in the Laramie area.  This is thanks in part to events like RecycleMania and the new Laramie mandate on recycling, which will begin this year with an additional $1.93 increase in monthly fees for city trash services. 

Although the city is moving forward on recycling, some people disagree about the overall benefits. 

According to a New York Times article written by John Tierney “Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”  

"People recycle because they have been misinformed about the facts of recycling," Daniel Benjamin said. 

Benjamin is a professor of economics at Clemson University and author of the paper “Eight Great Myths about Recycling.” 

The truth is that recycling doesn’t save resources and energy, doesn’t help the environment and we’re not running out of space for landfills to put our trash, said Benjamin. 

Rachel Smullen, an astronomy student, feels that recycling is the best thing a person can do to protect the planet.

“I feel that if someone doesn’t recycle when they have the opportunity to, then they are just lazy,” Smullen said.

According to Angela Logomasini, director of risk and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, it costs local government around $130 per ton to put trash in a landfill, and it costs the local government around $260 a ton to recycle.

These costs are widely unknown because a lot of subsidies are put on recycling to hind the true cost, William Robert Johnson said in his paper “Recycling and Deforestation.” 

A subsidy is assistance from the government in order to encourage the production or purchase of a good that people would not be willing to pay for in the free market.

Nursing student April Pasono said if recycling saves money and resources you would profit from doing it, but instead $8 billion a year goes to recycling from subsidies.

Recycling also reduces the availability of natural resources.

In the production of plastics for example, you actually get better quality product cheaper by harvesting virgin resources as opposed to recycled plastics, according to Benjamin.

Aluminum is the only resource that it does make sense to recycle because it costs less to recycle than to harvest from virgin material.  That is the reason people get money from recycling aluminum cans Johnson said in “Recycling and Deforestation.”

Another common reason people recycle is because they believe they are helping the environment.

However, according to Johnson, all the truck exhaust from transporting the recycled goods, the factory pollution and waste from de-inking, it is actually more environmentally sound to use new paper than recycled paper. 

Also, if we weren’t making new paper many trees wouldn’t exist. Most pulp used for paper is grown on tree farms specifically grown to make paper Benjamin said,

“Recycling does not save trees. There are more trees now then there were 200 years ago.”

A third common reason to recycle is for the overall reduction in landfill usage.

According to Logomasini, the U.S. produces 220 million tons of trash per year. A landfill 35 miles long by 35 miles wide, a small area in comparison to the total area of the U.S., would hold all the trash the US would produce in a 1,000 years. 

Moreover, once a landfill is full, the land is not wasted. Landfills can be made into parks or golf courses, Benjamin said. This is similar to LaBonte Park in Laramie.

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