More on Cincinnati's Budget: Curbside Recycling Is Bad for Everyone

Our previous post that connects to one part of Milton Dohoney's proposed 2007 Cincinnati city budget prompts us to make a controversial statement.

Dohoney proposes reducing curbside recycling to twice per month to save dollars. We think that's an excellent move, both environmentally and fiscally. In fact, we call for the courageous elimination of curbside recycling.

Why, gentle readers ask? Is SWIND a rapacious Republican who sees Planet Earth as his repository of wealth to be extracted and storehouse for waste to be dumped? Hardly. We just think, with many environmentalists, that curbside recycling makes little sense.

The reasons for this are simple:

• The materials typically recycled are not in short supply. Aluminum is among the most abundant minerals on earth. Glass is made from sand. We're unlikely to run short of petroleum extracts, a byproduct of refining used to make plastics, any time soon. Recycling paper does save trees, but at what expense (see below)? And if we ever did run short of these items, we could mine the landfills for them.
• In some cases, we understand, the energy used to recycle exceeds energy used to produce new products. And since energy usage is among the most critical environmental issues, the unnecessary expenditure of energy should be avoided.
• Curbside recycling doubles the number of heavy trucks on the road each week to collect our waste. Their exhausts more than offset any positive environmental impact of recycling.
• Landfills don't fill as quickly when people recycle, but the overall impact is fractional. Further, the landfill "crisis" seems to have been overblown. Well managed landfills have some negative environmental impact, but the issue is largely one of management. Further, the specter of a planet covered in trash is, of course, a mathematical impossibility, as a bit of reflection will show (we're not creating more matter when we throw something away, only moving something that we had previously extracted).

For those interested in an extended discussion, here's a place: an article from the New York Times Magazine (!) of about ten years' vintage.

So when the city is facing a tight budget and clear crime and safety issues, this is a no brainer. End the pointless, mildly destructive practice of curbside recycling, hire cops, and maybe even build a jail!