RECYCLING GETS BETTER THE MORE IT COSTS???

Post stolen from Dr. Roy Cordato

I want to thank Scott Mouw, Chief of Community and Business Assistance at DENR for calling my attention to a study that DENR has put out regarding job creation from recycling. It was apparently stimulated by a piece in last Friday's (Earth Day) Durham Herald where I was asked to submit 5 things that people can do to help the environment. The 5 included:

1. Don’t litter.
2. Respect your neighbor’s property rights. Harming the person or property of others is at the root of all environmental problems.
3. Recycle only what makes sense. The process of recycling, like all other production processes, uses resources and energy. Recycling can often use more than it saves.
4. No matter what size you choose, drive a newer car. Emissions are reduced by about 10 percent each year as old cars come off the road.
5. Before forming opinions about environmental issues learn some basic science and realize that there are at least two sides to every issue. Quite frequently, what everyone seems to know, just ain’t so.

[As an aside, I was the only person to suggest that people shouldn't litter. I was also probably the only one who would not be considered a traditional environmentalist.]

I think it was number 3 that caught Mouw's eye. I am particularly happy because the publication that he sent me and the study that it was derived from will now appear on the reading list for the class I teach at NC State--as example of really bad economic analysis. What needs to be realized is that the whole point of the study is to brag about the amount of labor resources that are being used up and diverted from other productive activities for recycling. This is only one of its many problems

Below is part of the abstract from this study. To get a sense of what is wrong with this whole thing I have substituted the word "pyramid" for "recycling" whenever it appears in the text.

"The objective of this study is to quantify the impacts of pyramids on jobs in North Carolina. This was accomplished by collecting survey data on the current employment status in public and private sector pyramid businesses and then comparing current data with information from 1994 and 2000 to determine the employment trends. Employment data from the pyramid industry is also compared with other industries’ employment over the same time period. Survey data indicates that the pyramid is a significant employer in North Carolina, supporting approximately 14,000 employees, or 0.35% of North Carolina’s workforce. The private sector supports ten times the number of pyramid employees as the public sector. In contrast to most other industries, pyramid employment has increased over the last 10 years. While traditional industries such as textiles and manufacturing have lost significant numbers of jobs over the past decade, pyramids have created jobs and increased their share of the labor market. North Carolina has approximately 1.2% of the nation’s pyramid jobs. This study points to the economic importance of continuing and expanding pyramid programs in North Carolina, which adds to the environmental benefits of recovering as much waste as possible. At the state and local levels, there is need for policies that encourage participation in pyramid programs and discourage waste disposal."

The original is here:

"The objective of this study is to quantify the impacts of recycling on jobs in North Carolina. This was accomplished by collecting survey data on the current employment status in public and private sector recycling businesses and then comparing current data with information from 1994 and 2000 to determine the employment trends. Employment data from the recycling industry is also compared with other industries’ employment over the same time period. Survey data indicates that recycling is a significant employer in North Carolina supporting approximately 14,000 employees, or 0.35% of North Carolina’s workforce. The private sector supports ten times the number of recycling employees as the public sector. In contrast to most other industries, recycling employment has increased over the last 10 years. While traditional industries such as textiles and manufacturing have lost significant numbers of jobs over the past decade, recycling has created jobs and increased its share of the labor market. North Carolina has approximately 1.2% of the nation’s recycling jobs. This study points to the economic importance of continuing and expanding recycling programs in North Carolina, which adds to the environmental benefits of recovering as much waste as possible. At the state and local levels, there is need for policies that encourage participation in recycling programs and discourage waste disposal."

Silly me--I thought the point of recycling was to save resources. Oh, I guess labor isn't a resource. The Soviet system generated full employment quite consistently.





THE GOOD NEWS THAT GREENIES IGNORE

Born 35 years ago in a fever of political activism, Earth Day is now a Hallmark Holiday. Earth Day and its traditional pieties about recycling and conservation now engender all of the public passion of Arbor Day. The Hallmarkization of Earth Day aptly symbolizes the predicament of 21st century ideological environmentalism. Unfortunately for green activists, the public now recognizes that their relentless predictions of imminent environmental apocalypse are a bunch of hooey. In fact, people need only look around to see that the state of the natural world in the United States and much of the world has greatly improved over the past 35 years. Sure, public schools still teach environmental doomster tracts to impressionable children, but public schools are always decades behind the rest of society, being, after all, the absolutely last places where new facts and ideas infiltrate.

Just in time for Earth Day, the American Enterprise Institute and the Pacific Research Institute released their annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators 2005. The 2005 Index looks at trends in air and water quality, the amount of toxic materials being released into the environment, and forest growth in the United States. Some the best news is on air quality trends. The Index finds that "air pollution fell again in the United States to its lowest level ever recorded." The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that since 1976, when national measuring began, levels of ozone in the air have dropped 31 percent, sulfur dioxides are down 72 percent, nitrogen dioxide was cut by 42 percent, carbon dioxide plunged 76 percent, and particulates (smoke and dust) fell by 31 percent. Air quality in the 10 largest metropolitan areas (four of the five most improved are in California) has improved an average of 53 percent since 1980.

The long-term trend in toxics being released into the environment is also positive, dropping by 55 percent since 1988. Despite ongoing suburbanization, between 1990 and 2000, U.S. forests expanded by more than 10 million acres. The Index notes that "for the eastern half of the United States, land cleared for farming and grazing in the 19th century has been reverting back to forestland at a net rate of one million acres a year since 1910." A big part of the reason that forests are expanding is that we no longer use horses for transport (land cleared for their grazing) and wood for fuel. Annual use of wood for noncommercial fuel has fallen from 5 billion cubic feet in 1900 to about 500 million cubic feet.

More problematic are water quality trends. Not because they are getting worse, but because scientists have never devised a good system for tracking water quality trends in rivers and lakes. The problem is that droughts, floods, seasonality and many other variables affect water quality in any given body of water at any given point. The EPA, trying to remedy this data insufficiency, has launched the Wadeable Streams Assessment program which will monitor streams at 500 randomly selected locations.

Nevertheless, Lake Erie is no longer "dead;" the Potomac, which in the 1960s was lined with signs warning against coming into contact with the water, now has beavers swimming under the Key Bridge connecting Roslyn and Georgetown; and the Cuyahoga River, which infamously caught fire, is now an upscale riverfront dining and entertainment district. The Index points out that the United States has spent nearly a $1 trillion on water quality since 1970. As a result, the wastes from 165 million Americans are today treated at modern sewage plants, up from 86 million in 1968.


More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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