Recycling has become fashionable. During the past year "recycling centers" have sprung up around the country. The citizen can leave his newspapers, bottles, or aluminum cans for reprocessing and carry away a warm glow that he has struck a blow for ecology. Meanwhile, numerous bills have been introduced in state legislatures and local governmental bodies to ban the use of nonreturnable containers—a reflection of the same interest in encouraging reuse.
The private sector also has responded. The aluminum industry has sponsored the collection of cans, for example, and the onetime junk dealer has been upgraded to a secondary materials handler. Other firms far removed from the generation of solid wastes have sought to capitalize on the public concern by marketing products labelled as using recycled materials. The best opportunity has been in paper products where everything from Christmas cards to toilet paper may be advertised as made from recycled material.
All in all, the private efforts to profit from the public's passion for recycling are harmless and may even do some good. However, things are not always what they seem, and the net effect of this fad may be rather small.
No private firm uses recycled materials out of altruism—their use has to be profitable. Where it has been profitable, we have already done a good bit of recycling. Quite possibly from the standpoint of social costs we should do more, but unless such costs become reflected in private costs, the businessman is unlikely to seriously alter his material inputs.
Three assumptions appear to underlie the public interest in greater recycling. The first is that recycling makes use of materials not previously utilized. The second is that such use results in a net decrease in residuals, thereby improving the environment. Finally, it is assumed that the recycling of materials is less damaging to the environment than the processing of other materials for which they substitute. All of these assumptions can be challenged.
The paper industry provides a good illustration of some of the issues. Paper can be made from virgin wood, from residues from wood products industries such as saw-mills, or from paper residuals. The choice between them is largely a matter of relative costs to the paper mill.
Even before the current interest in recycling, wood products residues were a growing source of material for paper production—as much as 70 percent of the input in the Pacific Northwest and nearly 20 percent in the Southeast. Such residues have become economically attractive as the cost of pulp has risen. Also, the use of wood products residues in paper making has been accelerated by air pollution controls that have made it costly to dispose of the residues by burning. Thus, use of this material was already underway in response to basic economic factors, and environmental controls on burning have only speeded it up.
Another major input to paper mills has been converting residuals—the unusable materials that result from transforming a jumbo roll of paper into paper products such as folding boxes, napkins, or typing paper. Anywhere from 2 to 20 percent of the original material is scrap in these processes. It becomes a very desirable input to paper mills because it is homogeneous, usually uncontaminated, and concentrated in a single location. Most of these converting residuals have been used for many years; in 1969 about 4 million tons of the 5 million generated were used.
Thus, both for wood products residues and converting residuals, much of the former and most of the latter materials were already being used in response to existing cost relationships. They were not burdening the environment. However, pollution controls limiting burning probably have stimulated greater reuse and thereby eased the solid waste management problem to a small degree.
Most attention has focused on paper discarded by the final user, the daily newspaper, for example. Only about 15-20 percent of these user residuals appear to be recycled at present. They are a difficult problem for waste management, and an increase in their reuse offers a real opportunity for reducing the costs of managing our solid wastes.
Would their use (which would reduce the amount of new pulp that we must produce) spare the environment? It depends. Paper residuals, like basic raw materials, require processing, and new residuals are generated in the course of processing. Whether the latter are less damaging than those generated by the use of virgin material depends on the characteristics of the corresponding residuals. For example, if 100 percent wastepaper is used to make a paper product, the result would be a substantially greater load of dissolved and suspended solids than would be generated by the kraft process using new material. On the other hand, the kraft process generates gaseous emissions that do not occur in wastepaper processing. Which kind of damage we are prepared to accept and the costs entailed by environmental protection will vary with the particular situation.
Not all types of paper products can be produced from paper residuals—the input components required for computer cards are different from those needed for newsprint. In other cases, greater use could be made of wastepaper if product specifications such as brightness were less stringent. In fact, product specifications, whether using new or recycled materials, may greatly affect the amount of residuals generated. A brown paper towel requires no bleaching (an environmentally burdensome process) while white paper must be bleached.
Public-spirited solid waste collection programs are not to be denigrated. They may have the advantage of educating the citizen against dispersal of trash (a great aesthetic improvement), and they concentrate and classify materials so that more of them can be reused. This worthy urge may make us overly susceptible to the pitchmen for recycled merchandise, however. Our new environmental consciousness has created a market for products using recycled materials, and quite a few firms present themselves as deserving patronage for this reason. In truth, many of them are only using the same materials and processes that they have always used. What is new is often only the label.
A version of this article appeared in print in the January 1972 issue of Resources magazine.
