Recycling is fake

It's ~80% feel-good lies and virtue signaling

I searched for a post elsewhere that puts this all together and couldn’t find it, so I guess it’s on me to write it.

What’s the steelman for recycling?

Waste disposal has a lot of negative externalities, and by taking care to recycle, we can make the waste stream smaller, and limit the amount of waste that ends up in landfills, and so minimize the need for landfills, and minimize those negative externalities.

Unfortunately, in actual practice we do this in the Worst Conceivable Way™, in ways that essentially maximize negative externalities, costs, and waste, while driving negligible value.

I’ve lived in a lot of cities where recycling is a big deal

Everyone spends a lot of time sorting through their trash, making sure that they’re not throwing away plastics, paper, or boxes, carefully rinsing and lovingly sorting them into the appropriate bins. They usually feel good about themselves, and look down on people that don’t recycle, because unlike those bootless savages, THEY care, and THEY are part of the solution, not the problem! The social opprobrium is a very real thing, too, for non-recyclers, or worse, people doing it wrong.

Directly in line with that, recycling is essentially powered by vibes and people wanting to pay 3-5x extra to look down on other people.

This is all a heinous waste of time and resources, because recycling is largely net negative in cost, energetics, and human impacts. So everyone is spending a ton of volunteered personal time to carefully sort and rinse a bunch of literal garbage, just to make the problem worse overall.

Some places in Europe and developed-world Asia are so bad they’ll even fine you if you don’t sacrifice your time on this pointless altar!

Let’s make that case - what about metal?

Literally the only thing that’s consistently net positive to recycle is metal.

Aluminum, yes, great idea. It saves energy, it saves costs, there’s no material quality degradation (it is closed loop vs open loop), it’s net carbon positive to recycle. Definitely recycle it. Steel too!

The average consumer goes through basically zero aluminum or steel annually. Maybe 10-15 pounds of aluminum, mostly soft drink cans and foil with some “small electrical,” and maybe 20-30 pounds of steel, mostly soup cans and appliances. That’s it!

At current scrap prices, that is $6 - $10 worth of aluminum, and $2 - $3 worth of steel annually per household. It’s pretty clear that the human time spent over a year to sort and wash out cans and aluminum foil is worth vastly more than the actual savings. Honestly, just the incremental energy, labor, and carbon footprint transporting your $10 worth of metal over ~50 trips in a year strongly outweighs any putative energetic savings, not to mention the not-insignificant time and resources spent sorting at the facility (as a triangulation point for that “not-insignificant” point, most major city recycling programs cost somewhere between $200-$700M annually).

Moreover, traditional waste disposal streams *already* do a great job pulling out metals like steel and aluminum, because it’s actually valuable and net positive. Your sorting is entirely superfluous. Making 50 extra “recycling” trips per year to pick up 40 pounds of metal is superfluous, and net negative from an economics, labor, energetics, and emission standpoint, which we’ll get into later.

Epistemic status: probably not worth it even in the very best case here, but if you did want to recycle, metal is most likely to be net positive.

But it gets worse, because:

The vast majority (~80%) of people’s recycling streams by volume and weight is paper and plastic

And these are NOT economically viable to recycle.

Reading academic papers about recycling is hilarious, because literally every single one is just slamming into the fundamental unviability of the entire operation at every data point and analytical outcome - “is the waste a mono-plastic (only one component) or a mixed plastic?” Lol, what do YOU think? Oh, it turns out that mixed plastics are the majority of the plastic waste stream and 100x more expensive to recycle? Who would have guessed?

“Is the plastic clean or contaminated with inorganic components, (small fractions of) other polymers or organic waste?” Boy, that’s a head scratcher, what would you surmise? Oh, you mean it happened again? At least 80%+ of the plastic waste stream is contaminated plastic and you have to set up a bunch of expensive processes and machines to deal with that, AND give up on 70%+ of it, too? Man, I guess we’re just unlucky?

Look at all the steps and machines involved in plastic recycling:

As we’re going to see later, we literally burn or throw away 92% of “recycled” plastic.

You really think getting people to volunteer their own personal time to sort and wash a year’s worth of plastic recyclables, making ~50 trips a year with 2mpg garbage trucks, buying and setting up all these machines, then running millions of tons of plastic through this whole system, for a 92% failure rate, is worth it?

OR recycling plastic is a fully dumb idea. But not a single author ever concludes this - it’s always “we need to ban plastic from landfills, and increase subsidies to plastic recycling companies.”

Plastic recycling is an immense pyre of waste and virtue signaling.

It requires subsidies, tons of wasted household volunteer time, tons of wasteful recycling truck trips, and at the end of the day, we majority burn it, landfill it, or dump it on the developing world to deal with.

And to be clear, dumping plastic and paper on the developing world to be “processed,” largely means “burned or thrown away, like you should have done in the first place, you Western twits, because when we burn it we don’t have pollution controls and a bunch of poor people breathe the fumes, or we dump it in the ocean creating garbage islands and polluting the entire global food chain with more microplastics.”

Glass

Glass is a total nightmare for recycling - it’s heavy, it’s contaminated, it breaks easily. It’s typically net negative itself per ton (ie recyclers have to pay to have the cullet taken away), AND it contaminates other stuff in the recycling stream.

“When glass comes in mixed from a household bin, by contrast, it’s not saleable for a profit, it costs a lot to move because of its weight, and it often contaminates other recycled materials. Think paper products with tiny glass shards. Now how much would you pay? So it’s a loss maker.”

Although it’s theoretically closed loop and we can remake glass bottles from recycled glass bottles forever, because it’s heavy and such a pain in the ass to deal with, it’s cheaper to make glass from sand.

More trouble than it’s worth.

Paper

This is your Amazon boxes, mostly. Some people read magazines and newspapers, some people have kids with homework and art projects, some people have weird “printed document” fetishes instead of using email and screens. But mostly Amazon boxes.

Source: EPA facts and figures about material waste and recycling

Is paper a good idea to recycle?

It’s better than plastic, but not net positive, economically. Around 65% of the paper that ends up in the waste stream ends up recycled, which is honestly pretty good.¹

Like plastic, paper is only able to be recycled in an open loop, with the quality degrading each time it’s recycled. It can go about 5-7 recycling cycles before it’s nonviable.

You’ve probably actually used recycled paper in end consumer products at some point - newspapers, paper towels, toilet paper, Amazon boxes. Lots of places use at least some portion of recycled paper pulp.

Recycled paper is largely net negative economically now that China adopted the National Sword policy and no longer takes recycled paper (or plastic) from Western countries - it requires subsidies. Before 2017 and that policy, we were shipping something like 30% of all paper and plastic waste to them.

But, one bit of good news - OCC (old corrugated cardboard, or Amazon boxes, as the average consumer might know them) is generally 2-10x more valuable per ton ($50-$150 a ton historically) than most other consumer paper (ie old magazines, newspapers, etc), which is basically worth nothing or net negative (-$10 - $30 a ton). If you could recycle only one paper thing, do Amazon boxes and cardboard first, and office paper second if you have / use a lot of it.

Recycling paper does save a little bit of energy and some trees - recycled paper saves 30-40% on energy, and for each ton of virgin paper you displace, it saves 15-17 trees.

This is a really minor savings. The energy saved is 3-4kwh per ton, which is literally 39 cents per ton. Sure, trees are nice - 15-17 sounds like a lot of trees. But those are paper trees grown in tree farms, not old growth oak trees in forests. The US uses 60-70M tons of paper a year, and around a third of that is from recycled stock. Let’s put it at 66M tons total / 22M tons recycled.

Hey, 22M * 16 trees = 350M trees sounds like a lot! But we have ~20B trees just in tree farms and plantations - that is literally 1.8% of the commercial tree stock.

For that matter, we have 540 billion trees on US Forest Service land! This is saving ~.066% of the total trees in the US, and they’re farmed trees to begin with. It’s not significant.

Not just that, paper is heavy - just the incremental collection costs of ~50 recycling truck trips a year in labor and gas and operating expenses makes paper recycling strongly net negative - the low prices per ton are not able to offset the 3-5x higher costs of collection and processing.²

Given that paper is ~2/3 of the recycling waste stream by weight, and the upsides are fairly minimal, and the downsides in economics and energetics outweigh those upsides by around 3-5x, I don’t think there’s a strong case to be made for “recycling paper” over “landfilling paper.”

If you accept WARM estimates of carbon savings (I do not, I suspect there’s something seriously off about them),³ paper is strongly net positive to recycle from an emissions standpoint. But recycling operations are run at such an extreme cost multiple of the end products’ value that simply buying carbon offsets would be 3-100x cheaper, with a centroid around 50x.

But if you were running recycling trucks and operations anyways (which we have just shown is a bad idea given the overall costs vs benefits), then recycling paper is probably fine. You should only recycle cardboard boxes and office paper, everything else is a loss and not actually recycled (it’s burned or landfilled).

Plastic

Plastic is the villain of the recycling story, for SO many reasons. Let’s start with economics.

Recycled plastic actually costs 10-35% MORE than fresh plastic for a lot of compounds!

Not just that, there’s a noticeable quality hit - plastics are made of polymer chains that break down as it gets recycled - you can only recycle plastic 2-3 times before you need new plastic, and that plastic is lower grade at each recycling. Those prices are charging more for a strictly inferior product.

The only plastics worth anything are plastics #1,2, and 5:

“Plastic #1 – your basic single-use water bottle, can be sold for $250 per ton now, down from about $325 a few years ago. Plastic #5 – consisting of heavier plastics – has stayed steady at $150 per ton, while plastic #2 made up of milk jugs and detergent bottles is actually up slightly in some markets.

Other plastics are virtually un-saleable at any price as a secondary commodity following China’s policy change, and will go to a landfill.”

Even of these “marginally worth something” plastics, only around 30% gets recycled from the waste stream, largely due to organic contamination.

Don’t over-index on those prices too much, that was as of 2021, and the spot price for recycled plastics and paper is hugely volatile, and crashes down near 0 relatively often. Those private companies that run the recycling plants pretty much always have provisions in their contracts where cities have to pay additional amounts if that happens.

What is the final disposition of plastic overall?

The vast majority of “recycling” operations are run by for-profit private companies that municipalities contract with. Most of them are traditional waste processing companies like Waste Management.

Do you know why the Mafia is historically associated with waste disposal in Italy and New York and New Jersey? Because it makes money, and recycling is the lion’s share of revenue for many of these companies. The Mafia gets involved because if you have flexible ethics, it’s really easy to charge 3-5x more for “recycling” (vs waste handling / dumping), but actually throw away most of it. And lo, this is exactly what happens!

So where does your “recycled” plastic ultimately go?

16% is burned domestically. 75% is landfilled. ~1-2% is shipped overseas. The remaining 8% is recycled.⁴

Back to my “is the plastic mono-plastic” and “is the plastic clean” points above, no, the answer is neither. 92% of the plastic in your carefully sorted “recycling” bin is thrown away or burned. Because plastic and paper is largely not profitable, and because of “wishcycling,” recycling companies just don’t mess with it, and landfill or burn most of it.

For the stuff that’s cheaper to ship overseas, these private companies do that, too - shipping 600-800k tons a year halfway across the world to be dealt with in the developing world with zero pollution controls or health protections.

The remaining 8% wasn’t net profitable to recycle (see recycled plastic costing more than virgin, and a triangulation later in this article) without subsidies and big contracts from municipalities that cover any downside (ie most companies have provisions in their contract such that any deficits in the spot market prices of recycled plastic are made up with extra funds from the municipality. It’s heads I win, tails you lose).

We burn a lot of plastic

This is because plastic is basically “frozen gasoline” (or at least hydrocarbons). It comes from oil, and has a lot of that latent energy still in it, so burning it is net positive, energetically.

When we burn plastics, we release CO2, even if it’s burned in a nice developed country with pollution scrubbers. But 120-160k tons of burned plastics is burned in the developing world,⁵ where it is burned with far fewer pollution controls, and where it still releases CO2, while poisoning a lot of poor people with air pollution.

Of the 8% that’s actually recycled, the vast majority goes into things like tires or rubber fill in construction, and cheap “fast fashion” clothes, not more plastic bottles or packaging, because plastic degrades at each recycling step.

So at the end of the day, you spent hours of your life per year cumulatively sorting and washing plastics, they went through a gigantic, labor and capital equipment intensive sorting operation, all to end up at 92%+ of it being thrown away or burned, with 600-700k tons of that consuming additional energy and fuel and producing additional CO2 because it was shipped 10k miles across the world be thrown away or burned in the developing world, and a mere 8% or so is ultimately recycled.

OR, hear me out here - you could have just thrown your stuff in the trash like every normal human being used to do in all the ~2M years of hominin existence before 1990 or so, and everything would have been 92% the same, PLUS that plastic would have been sequestered in a landfill, not generating CO2, PLUS you wouldn’t have spent fuel and emissions to ship it to the third world, PLUS you wouldn’t have burned a bunch of plastic in the third world without any pollution controls that poor people would have breathed in and suffered cumulative early deaths from.⁶

What about those metals that made sense? They’re already extracted from the regular waste stream with magnets and recycled.

This is crazy and it costs a crazy amount

Do you know how much it *costs* to run those pointless equipment-and-labor intensive operations to skim out the widow’s-mite-worth of ultimately recycled materials?

It’s difficult to get reliable figures, because most recycling operations are privately operated and contracted with by municipal governments (which certainly sets off my own “somebody is definitely getting screwed here” radar, and it’s almost certainly not the private companies, it’s the taxpayers). But some cities run their own programs.

According to data from New York City, the average cost to collect recyclables is $686 per ton. Contaminated recyclable loads are disposed of at an average of $80 per ton. This means that contaminated recyclable loads cost logistics companies as much as $766 per ton. In contrast, the average cost of collecting waste without segregation is $126.03 per ton. That is a 5-6x difference in costs for recycling vs regular waste handling.

This data is from New York,⁷ so maybe you’re thinking “Sure, this is New Yawk! Everything is expensive there! The labor is all unionized, the energy and land is expensive, and...” Okay, you’re right. NYC is generally more expensive.

But in Miami, a ton of recycling costs $227 per ton,⁸ versus a $74 per ton garbage contract disposal fee (ie, they’re paying a private company, if they just did it themselves it would probably be 10-20% cheaper, or around $60) - that’s a ~3x difference.

In Seattle, the net cost per ton for recycling is $454⁹, but the tipping fee (and tipping fees necessarily cover the costs and more) per ton for garbage is $154 per ton, a factor of ~3x.

In Dallas, recycling costs $192 per ton, versus a $42 per-ton tipping fee.¹⁰ That’s another 4.6x difference, approaching NYC.

Bottom up costs vs benefits triangulation

Remember when we top-down estimated a cost of $4 - $8B up there for paper? If we just simply average all these “recycling per ton” costs, we get $328 a ton.

Paper bottom up triangulation: 25M tons recycled cost at ~$328 a ton = $8.2B paid by municipalities for paper recycling annually.

So we’re collectively paying something like $8B for $1 - $3B in recycled paper value, which is 3-8x greater costs than benefits, or a ~5.5x greater costs centroid.

Plastic bottom up triangulation - 3.09M tons recycled at $328 a ton = ~$1B in costs to recycle plastic annually. For ~$308M in recycled plastic value,¹¹ or ~3.3x greater costs than benefits at this central estimate.

OR you could stop the virtue signaling and waste, and give up on mostly fake recycling efforts. Oh, and you, the taxpayers, wouldn’t have paid $200 - $700M per year¹² to run a net-losing “recycling operation.”

Does that *really* sound like the worse option?

If you just threw your garbage in the trash, you’d be sequestering carbon, saving third world lives, AND you’d be paying 1/3 - 1/5 the price!

Worried about emissions? By all means, buy carbon offsets for all that, and you’ll still come out significantly ahead!

When does recycling make sense?

Recycling makes sense for business and industrial concerns that generate large amounts of mostly single-type recyclable goods. Offices generating office paper waste, box factories, logistics companies, and retailers generating cardboard waste, manufacturing concerns generating single-type plastic waste that’s #1,2, or 5.

Those places make a lot of sense for recycling. They generate large amounts, it’s single source, it’s not smeared with french fry oil or pizza sauce, and it’s the high value stuff. In fact, it makes so much sense the market takes care of itself - recyclers generally pay those businesses to take their waste and recycle it, because it’s of a quality and type and quantity that is actually net profitable to deal with.

For regular consumers? It does NOT make sense. By weight, the most we get up to is ~25% recycled, and that’s largely (~2/3) Amazon boxes and office paper, and was not net profitable to collect or recycle. Even if you have the most conscientious and scrupulous consumers in the world, ie South Korea, they only get up to ~56% recycled by weight, and globally, the average is around 27%.

Once again, if you do the math on the labor and energetics of collecting all these “recyclables,” the majority of which get burnt or landfilled, it’s 3x more than any conceivable benefit. If you want the carbon emission benefits of recycling all that paper, pay for offsets, it would 5 - 100x cheaper.

Regular consumer recycling relies on a vast army of unpaid volunteer labor to do net negative, net unproductive work, the vast majority of which is wasted (70-80%), and then operating hundred million dollar operations at 3-5x the cost to end at ~25% total waste recycled.

That juice is not worth the squeeze.

Yes, sorting and rinsing doesn’t seem like a lot of effort. Yes, it probably felt good and felt like you were part of “the solution” before reading this article.

But if you do the math, the average consumer probably spends 2-5 hours per year sorting and rinsing stuff to be “recycled.” Over the 1B people in the developed world, that’s 2-5B hours annually, or 3-7k lifetimes wasted annually, on something that’s ~80% wasted and pointless.

What would you get if you eliminated “recycling” programs in YOUR city?

• 3-5x cheaper waste disposal

• You’d save the cumulative billions in labor, energy costs, and emissions from the ~50 extra truck trips a year to pick up your unprofitable “recycling" that’s mostly burned or thrown away anyways

• You’d save 2-5 hours a year you could spend with your kids or on your favorite hobby

• Collectively, we’d save 3-7k lifetimes annually in consumer volunteer time that is currently 75% wasted in the service of 3-5x as expensive for-profit “recycling” companies

• You’d get fewer developing world deaths and cancers, as well as less microplastics in the ocean and food chain, from burning and/ or dealing with 600-800k tons per year of our waste without any pollution controls or personal health protections

What should you do if you’re gonna be stuck recycling anyways because your city sucks and the Eye of Karen is upon you?

1. Metals (soft drink cans, foil, soup cans) are profitable, but it doesn’t matter if you throw them in the trash or the recycling bin, they’re sorted either way. If you want to subsidize the private recycling companies milking your municipality, put it in the recycling bin, otherwise trash it.

2. Don’t recycle glass - it’s heavy, not profitable, and mainly contaminates other recyclable goods when it breaks, bringing already poor recycling percentages down.

3. For paper, only recycle used or clean office paper and Amazon boxes / cardboard.

4. For plastic, only recycle clean water bottles and milk and detergent jugs, the rest is noise / actively harmful.

1. Outside triangulation:

300M total, 22.5% paper, for 71M tons total

49M in recycling stream - 69% recycled

12% * 35M burned = 4.2M burned

11.8% * 146M landfilled = 17M landfilled

2% shipped overseas = 1.42M

Remaining to be recycled = 48.4M - nice, it's actually majority recycled

Direct cite says 46M tons recycled, for 65% recycled overall, not bad.

https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/national-overview-facts-and-figures-materials

2. Spread across ~100M households in the US, moving all that paper uses ~80 - 120M incremental gallons of diesel (at 2-3mpg) and emits about a million metric tons of CO2. According to the BLS, there’s ~130k refuse and recycling collectors (garbagemen), and let’s majorly lowball them and say they average $50k a year fully loaded. That’s $6.5B in salaries a year (probably more like $10B+). Recycling trips are generally 1/3 - 1/2 of the total trips they take. so let’s allocate $2 - $5B in incremental “recycling trip” costs. We need about ~100k trucks for all those trips, which cost $250k on average, so thats $25B. The same 1/3 - 1/2 recycling allotment gets us to $8 - $12B. Amortizing that over 5 years gives us an annual cost of $1.6 - $2.4B in capexed equipment costs incremental to recycling per year (yes, we would have needed the trucks anyways for regular waste collection, but the incremental recycling trips do make the trucks wear out sooner, need repairs and replacement sooner, etc).

And what did they collect?

The mixed paper was worthless, on average, and the OCC is typically around 40-50% of the paper waste stream - this shakes out to about ~20-25M tons of OCC in the US recycling stream. That shakes out to ~$1B - $3.8B in max economic value per year.

So we paid $2 - $5B in incremental “recycling trip” salaries, $1.6 - $2.4B in incremental equipment costs, burned up ~$500M of diesel and emitted a million tons of CO2 to “recycle” $1 - 3.8B in paper.

Costs: $4B - $8B. Benefits? $1 - $3B.

Does recycling paper save emissions on net? Yes, if you use absolutely crazy WARM estimates of 3 tons of carbon saved per ton of paper recycled, it saves 100-150M tons of CO2. As an aside, I don’t believe that WARM number at all, it’s probably 5-10x optimistic - see the next footnote.

Nevertheless, let’s give it to them, let’s take their numbers at face value, and say it saves 100-150M tons of CO2.

The cost of offsetting carbon ranges from $1 - $30 a ton, so if you just paid to offset this carbon, it would cost you between $100M - $3B, versus the ~$8B in costs (triangulated a second bottom-up way later, it comes out at the high $8B end).

3. I don’t buy the WARM numbers of ~3 metric tons net GHG’s saved per ton of paper recycled AT ALL - that’s 5-6x the literal amount of carbon contained in the paper. I haven’t deep dived on methodologies yet, but outside view, where can you even get that? You still have to transport and logistics the recyclable paper from recycling centers to paper mills. You still have to use the pulp in all the same energy-using processes, you still have to transport the clean, new paper in all the same logistics webs. You can only recycle paper so many times, so it still ultimately ends up burned or in a landfill like all our trash, so the end state disposition will always be the same.

It really seems to me the only steps you’re able to avoid is “cutting down trees, taking them to sawmills, shredding them with saws, and then getting to paper pulp.” And they think there’s SIX TIMES more carbon in that handful of steps than there literally is in the paper itself?? I don’t buy it. It doesn’t take that much energy to cut down trees and mill and transport them. I plan on deep diving, but am coming in skeptical.

o1 Pro says the bulk of the 3 tons figure comes from WARM assuming that landfilled paper produces a lot of methane, and further assumes it’s all released into the air. That’s also extremely suspect - burying paper should be mostly carbon sequestration, and most landfills use or burn the methane generated so it doesn’t actually get into the stratosphere. But even if that were true, you can’t take credit for it, because recycling is limited, and the end state disposition of both virgin and recycled paper is ultimately the same, all you can ever do is time shift that.

Another point of triangulation? This graph compares the carbon impacts of various hand drying methods, and virgin paper towels are essentially the same as recycled paper towels (when they should be ~5-6x lower if you buy the WARM numbers): https://imgur.com/a/6biZ6BP

Another triangulation? If you ask o1 Pro or find online “carbon impact” calculators, the amount you save by eliminating paper usage by 50M tons comes out exactly the same as the WARM calculations for recycling 50M tons; 100 - 150M tons of CO2 saved. But this is a logical impossibility - reducing MUST save more than recycling, because to recycle papers you have to collect them with a bunch of 2mpg garbage trucks over ~50 trips per year, sort them at the recycling center, throw away 35% of the paper, then use trucks to move the remaining paper to the paper mills, then do all the processes to make it usable paper products again.

There should be something like an order of magnitude difference between “reducing” vs “recycling,” and the fact that WARM wants to say “recycling” saves as much as “reducing” is highly suspect, and probably something like 5-10x over-estimated.

4. Outside Triangulation:

Total plastic in the waste stream = 12.2% * 300M tons = 37M tons

Total plastic burned = 16.2% * 35M = 5.7M tons

Total plastic landfilled = 18.5% * 146 = 27M tons

Total shipped overseas = 2% * 37M = 740k tons

Remaining plastic that could have been actually recycled = 37 - 27 - 5.7 - .7 = 3.56M tons = 9.6%

Actual number on the site: 3,090,000 tons = 8% of plastic recycled

https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/national-overview-facts-and-figures-materials

5. Since China adopted National Sword and we can’t ship them our garbage any more, we generally ship 600k - 800k tons overseas annually. About 20% of that is burned, so 20% is 120k-160k tons. Prior to National Sword, we were shipping something like 22M tons annually of plastic and paper recycling overseas, so our contribution to overseas burning and landfilling and ocean dumping has been greatly reduced.

6. Early deaths due to air pollution are generally ~6x higher in the developing world vs the developed world, and there’s ~8M air pollution deaths globally.

Even if the burned plastic only contributed 1% to that in the developing world, that’s ~6k incremental deaths in the developing world from Western trash being burned there.

It’s also worth remembering that we used to ship ~30% of our paper and plastic waste overseas, were doing that for many years, and so were contributing a lot more deaths and ocean-dumped microplastics than we are now pre-2017.

https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-releases/air-pollution-accounted-81-million-deaths-globally-2021-becoming

7. Husock, Howard. “The Declining Case for Municipal Recycling.” June 2020. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/recycling-cost-benefit-analysis.

8. Miami cite - $205M total annual recycling cost divided by 900k tons total recycled.

9. Seattle figures from here.

10. $42 a ton tipping fees average: https://www.tceq.texas.gov/downloads/permitting/waste-permits/publications/as-187-23.pdf

Also from here, we get ~1.2M tons non compost / yard material diverted for recycling.

From this source, we get that residents pay ~$38 a month, or $456 a year for combined trash and recycling, and commercial customers pay $40 a month for garbage and $26 a month for recycling, or about 26/66 = 39% of the consumer $456 a year can be roughly allocated for recycling. That’s $178 per year for recycling per resident, with 1.3M residents, that’s $231M per year for recycling annually. Across the ~1.2 million pounds, that’s $193 cost per ton of recycling.

Yes, that’s assuming all recycled tonnage comes from consumers. However, it’s hard to find a split, and since we’re assuming the same relative waste / recycling split across consumer and commercial, and because the 1.2M pounds is a total number, this basically works.

No commercial / residential split support from the first link in this footnote:

“The majority of MSW disposed in Texas is residential and commercial waste; however, landfill operators have difficulty in estimating the amounts received for each waste type. For this annual summary, residential and commercial wastes are combined and referred to as “municipal” waste. In 2022, municipal waste accounted for approximately 63% of the 39.73 million tons of waste disposed at MSW landfills”

The rest of the ~37% of waste is 23% construction and demolition debris and 14% other categories.

11. Plastic value estimation:

50% Plastic 1 and 5, 250 and 150 per ton respectively

3.09M tons * 50% = 1.55M tons, .77 each

770k tons * 250 = $193M

770k tons * 150 = $115M

Total plastic economic value = $308M

12. $205M Miami, $226M Seattle, $300M SF, $761M NYC, $231M Dallas