Alex Chalmers and Rob Wiblin’s “Just bury your trash” challenges a durable assumption of modern environmentalism: that recycling is intrinsically virtuous while landfill represents failure. Their evidence supports a more selective view. Recycling metals often makes excellent sense, and some clean plastics can be worth recovering. But many other materials require more labor, energy, water, transport, and capital to recycle than to replace and dispose of safely. Modern sanitary landfill, meanwhile, bears little resemblance to the uncontrolled dumps that still dominate the public imagination.
That leaves a political question: if recycling so often fails an ordinary cost-benefit test, how did it become nearly compulsory? The answer requires distinguishing recycling from the recycling movement. People have long recovered valuable scrap whenever the value justified the effort. What is new is the doctrine that recycling should be pursued as a general social objective even when recovery costs more than it yields. That doctrine was institutionalized through government.
Recycling Before Recyclingism
The economic question is simple: is the material recovered worth more than the resources sacrificed to recover it? Murray N. Rothbard, in his discussion of the conservation of natural resources, argued that markets answer through prices. When a resource becomes scarce, its price rises, encouraging economizing, substitution, new supply, and recovery of existing stocks. Rothbard used copper as an example: rising prices create recycling incentives without a central conservation plan.
That logic fits Chalmers and Wiblin’s strongest examples. Metals recycle well because discarded aluminum and copper are valuable; worthwhile scrap is inventory awaiting an entrepreneur. The opposite case is equally informative. If a plastic tub has no buyer unless taxpayers finance collection, households sort it without compensation, and regulation helps create demand for the resin, its lack of spontaneous value tells us something. Low prices and losses are information. The recycling movement inverted this test by beginning with the desired answer—recycle—and designing policy to produce it.
From Disposal Policy to a Waste Hierarchy
The transformation is visible in American waste policy. The federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 established goals that included conserving energy and natural resources and reducing waste. By 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency had adopted a national goal of 25 percent source reduction and recycling by 1992, while its 1989 Agenda for Action explicitly preferred source reduction and recycling to landfill or combustion. Government was no longer merely restricting dangerous disposal; it was ranking competing methods of resource use.
States converted that hierarchy into mandates. California’s 1989 Integrated Waste Management Act required jurisdictions to divert 25 percent of solid waste by 1995 and 50 percent by 2000. Britain’s 1996 Landfill Tax made landfill less attractive to encourage recycling and recovery, while the European Union’s 2008 Waste Framework Directive formalized a hierarchy ending with disposal. Governments did not invent recycling; they made it an administratively-preferred social objective.
The landfill “crisis” that helped propel recycling in the late 1980s was partly institutional. The 1987 Mobro 4000 garbage barge, unable to unload more than 3,000 tons of New York garbage, became an emblem of an alleged shortage of landfill space. Yet permitted capacity is not the same as physical land availability. The City of San Diego’s historical account notes that federal waste laws increased costs while environmental review made new facilities harder to permit. This does not show landfill regulation was unnecessary; the narrower point is that policy can restrict legally-permitted landfill capacity even without a serious physical shortage of safe burial space.
E. C. Pasour Jr. made a related point about conservation policy: alleged resource problems often cannot be understood independently of previous government interventions. One intervention raises the cost of an activity, the resulting price is interpreted as evidence of scarcity, and another intervention is introduced as the cure.
When Prices Disappear, Targets Take Their Place
Why did recycling policy come to revolve around percentages rather than whether particular activities actually saved resources? In Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises distinguished profit management from bureaucratic management. Entrepreneurs can compare the market value of their output with the value of the resources they consume. A bureau whose output is not voluntarily bought and sold lacks the same test, so it relies on statutory objectives and measurable targets.
Recycling rates are such a substitute. Municipalities can count tons diverted, but “50 percent recycled” says nothing by itself about whether resources were conserved. Another ton of plastic may require diesel, machinery, water, electricity, household labor, and capital worth more than the recovered resin. The target still records success. Per Bylund makes precisely this point in “The Recycling Myth.” He emphasizes the decentralized labor imposed on households that separate, clean, store, and prepare material before municipal recycling begins. Lee Friday develops the same argument more explicitly, noting that tax-financed collection and unpaid sorting can conceal part of the industry’s true cost.
Governments can also manufacture demand for recyclables. Federal procurement rules tied to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act may require agencies using federal funds to purchase EPA-designated products containing recovered materials, including recycled-content paper, re-refined oil, retread tires, and insulation. If government subsidizes collection and then uses its purchasing power to create demand for the output, the existence of a “market” does not prove that the original recycling process was economical. Nor can a landfill tax that deliberately changes relative prices later be cited as independent proof that the original market was wasting resources.
Murray Rothbard’s discussion of conservation laws in Power and Market makes the broader point: compulsory conservation does not merely “save resources”; it changes their allocation among competing uses. The real question is not whether policy can cause more recycling, but whether the additional recycling is worth what must be sacrificed to obtain it. A regulatory target cannot answer that question because the target has replaced the market test.
Pollution Without Recyclingism
Criticism of compulsory recycling does not mean pollution should be free. If a landfill contaminates another person’s groundwater or otherwise causes demonstrable damage, a genuine environmental conflict exists. Roy Cordato’s Austrian theory of environmental economics treats pollution as a conflict between human plans and property uses rather than as a single social quantity to be optimized by planners. Murray Rothbard similarly treated pollution as a property-rights problem in “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution.” Where pollution physically invades and damages another person or property, the issue is liability, not failure to meet a government-devised optimum.
A different principle follows: require waste disposers to bear the costs they actually impose on others, protect property against demonstrable pollution, and then allow prices, entrepreneurship, technology, and consumer preferences to determine whether an object should be reused, recycled, burned, or buried. This may produce more recycling where recovered material is genuinely valuable and less where recycling consumes more resources than it saves.
The Blue Bin as a Political Institution
Once governments adopted diversion targets, bureaucracies acquired missions to achieve them. Municipalities built collection systems, contractors and manufacturers adapted, procurement programs supported secondary-material markets, landfill taxes penalized alternatives, and schools normalized source separation. Over time, the administrative hierarchy became a moral hierarchy. Recycling ceased to be understood mainly as a variable industrial process; it became evidence of good citizenship.
This is why Chalmers and Wiblin’s argument sounds more radical than its engineering claims warrant. Saying that mixed plastic may be cheaper and cleaner to landfill than recycle can sound almost like endorsing littering, even though the propositions are fundamentally different. Littering concerns pollution and property; recycling concerns the choice among competing industrial processes. The recycling movement successfully merged them.
The better rule is less inspiring as a slogan but more serious as economics: recycle when recycling conserves resources; bury waste when burial conserves resources; prevent or punish actual pollution in either case. Ending compulsory, one-size-fits-all recycling would not mean ending recycling. Aluminum and copper would remain valuable, machinery would still be repaired, and scrap dealers would still buy what is worth recovering. What would disappear are activities that survive only because the state taxes their alternatives, subsidizes their inputs, mandates their use, manufactures demand for their outputs, or requires citizens to supply part of the labor for free.
If an environmental practice can survive only after its true costs have been hidden or politically transferred to somebody else, we should at least entertain the possibility that what is being conserved is not nature but the policy itself.
