San Francisco Nearing Recycling Goal
The city of San Francisco appears to be doing an exceptional job at diverting material from the landfill. The recent announcement that they are only 3% away from their goal of 75% recycling is pretty noteworthy. I applaud them. I do want to offer some words of caution. I suggest they do some careful analysis of their recycling efforts to ensure that their efforts aren’t doing more environmental damage than good.
Sometimes, in our race to recycle everything possible, we forget that recycling does take energy; energy for initial processing of material, transportation, and energy for final processing into a useable product. Believe me, I am all for recycling, it is part of what we do. The key is responsible recycling. If San Francisco is achieving a net improvement to the environment (as measured by a non-biased, non-partisan person/organization), then the rest of us should certainly see what we can learn from them to improve recycling across the country and offer the plaudits they deserve.
Tags: environment, recycling
May 20th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Good point. How can people learn what is good to recycle and what isn’t? You make the point that it takes energy to recycle and it sounds like every location, and situation is different. But are there some general guidelines you can point to? For example, I have always heard aluminum is great to recycle. But I have wondered about cardboard and plastic and other stuff. Like with cardboard, isn’t biomass a good component for a landfill. How much energy is used to turn cardboard into something vs just letting it go to the landfill? Anyway, maybe other people have these questions too.
thanks
May 21st, 2009 at 4:11 pm
One way to look at whether or not recycling an item makes sense is to equate energy to money. If the company or companies involved can pay for the equipment and labor for processing, the fuel and electricity for processing, the clean up, disposal and control of any pollutants involved, transportation to and from the processors and back to market and still break even or make a profit, then it no doubt makes sense to recycle the item. If it requires taxpayer money to fund the recycling of an item, it probably does not make sense from an energy standpoint. I suspect many curbside and co-mingle type programs fall into this category largely due to the huge inefficiencies involved. Over the years I’ve also seen many small town recyclers set up shop and go broke trying to haul household recycling 30+ miles to the nearest collection center. Population (volume) and proximity to the processor may be two of the biggest factors involved. So, bottom line, there is no quick and easy answer. To a large degree, I think we can let our free enterprise system determine what gets recycled. If someone can make a buck at it, chances are someone will be doing it and it will make sense from an energy standpoint to be doing it.