Americans have a misplaced trust in the environmental benefits of recycling their metals, glass and plastics, many city officials have discovered to their dismay. The main problem is the expense.
Communities in Virginia are reaping big money by accepting New York City trash. Virginia’s seven regional landfills employ hundreds of residents, pay out millions in annual wages and bring in more than $500 million annually to the state. Landfill fees enabled one county to build a new courthouse and a school at the same time cutting real estate taxes by about one-third.
Studies have shown that 80 percent of landfills in existence in 1991 posed a risk of cancer of less than one in a million equivalent to the risk of getting cancer from drinking a half litre of wine in a year.
Recycling is an article of faith to Green activists. But as New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani said in 1996, “It is impossible to reach a mandated recycling level unless you take all the people in New York, put them in prison, and force them to recycle.”
Source: Angela Logomasini (Competitive Enterprise Institute), Forced Recycling Is a Waste, Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2002.
For text (WSJ subscribers) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1016494799866922160,00.htm
For more on Recycling http://www.ncpa.org/iss/env
FMF Policy Bulletin\26 March 2002
