Extracts from the New York Times Op-Ed article The Reign of Recycling

By John Tierney, published on October 3, 2015

Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an
unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from
kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated
people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits.
Read the 3 paragraphs assigned to your group and discuss them with
your partners. Take either a favorable or an opposing stance on the views
stated and construct arguments in favor and/or against those opinions.
You will present your arguments to the rest of the class.

GROUP 1

Statement 1
Most people also assume that recycling plastic
bottles must be doing lots for the planet. […]
But how much difference does it make? Here’s
some perspective: To offset the greenhouse
impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between
New York and London, you’d have to recycle
roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly
coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where
each passenger takes up more space, it could be
more like 100,000.

Statement 2
The environmental benefits of recycling come chiefly from reducing the need to
manufacture new products — less mining, drilling, and logging. But that’s not so
appealing to the workers in those industries and to the communities that have
accepted the environmental trade-offs that come with those jobs.

Statement 3
As a business, recycling is on the wrong side of two long-term global economic
trends. For centuries, the real cost of labor has been increasing while the real
cost of raw materials has been declining. That’s why we can afford to buy so
much more stuff than our ancestors could. As a labor-intensive activity,
recycling is an increasingly expensive way to produce materials that are less
and less valuable.

C1 Discussion The Environment

Extracts from the New York Times Op-Ed article The Reign of Recycling
By John Tierney, published on October 3, 2015
Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an
unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from
kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated
people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits.
Read the 3 paragraphs assigned to your group and discuss them with
your partners. Take either a favorable or an opposing stance on the views
stated and construct arguments in favor and/or against those opinions.
You will present your arguments to the rest of the class.

GROUP 2

Statement 4
One of the original goals of the recycling
movement was to avert a supposed crisis because
there was no room left in the nation’s landfills. But
that media-inspired fear was never realistic in a
country with so much open space. In reporting the
1996 article I found that all the trash generated by
Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on
one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for
grazing.

Statement 5
According to the E.P.A.’s estimates, virtually all the greenhouse benefits —
more than 90 percent — come from just a few materials: paper, cardboard and
metals like the aluminum in soda cans. That’s because recycling one ton of
metal or paper saves about three tons of carbon dioxide, a much bigger payoff
than the other materials analyzed by the E.P.A. Recycling one ton of plastic
saves only slightly more than one ton of carbon dioxide. A ton of food saves a
little less than a ton. For glass, you have to recycle three tons in order to get
about one ton of greenhouse benefits. Worst of all is yard waste: it takes 20
tons of it to save a single ton of carbon dioxide.

Statement 6
Composting facilities around the country have inspired complaints about
nauseating odors, swarming rats, and defecating sea gulls. After New York City
started sending food waste to be composted in Delaware, the unhappy
neighbors of the composting plant successfully campaigned to shut it down last
year.

C1 Discussion The Environment

Extracts from the New York Times Op-Ed article The Reign of Recycling
By John Tierney, published on October 3, 2015
Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an
unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from
kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated
people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits.
Read the 3 paragraphs assigned to your group and discuss them with
your partners. Take either a favorable or an opposing stance on the views
stated and construct arguments in favor and/or against those opinions.
You will present your arguments to the rest of the class.

GROUP 3

Statement 7
Despite decades of exhortations and mandates,
it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities
to recycle household waste than to send it to a
landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have
plummeted because of lower oil prices and
reduced demand for them overseas.

Statement 8
[…] cities have been burying garbage for thousands of years, and it’s still the
easiest and cheapest solution for trash. The recycling movement is floundering,
and its survival depends on continual subsidies, sermons and policing. How can
you build a sustainable city with a strategy that can’t even sustain itself?

Statement 9
It would be much simpler and more effective to impose the equivalent of a
carbon tax on garbage, as Thomas C. Kinnaman has proposed after conducting
what is probably the most thorough comparison of the social costs of recycling,
landfilling and incineration. Dr. Kinnaman, an economist at Bucknell University,
considered everything from environmental damage to the pleasure that some
people take in recycling (the “warm glow” that makes them willing to pay extra
to do it).

C1 Discussion The Environment