April 6, 2011
Why Recycling is an Energy Policy
More than three-quarters of all Americans recycle, and on the East and West Coasts, nearly 90% do. But although virtually everyone agrees that recycling is good for the environment, most people do not think of recycling as a solution for one of today’s biggest problems – energy dependence on climate-disrupting fossil fuels. A closer look reveals that recycling can play a serious role in reducing energy use and increasing efficiency.
Recycling delivers a host of environmental benefits, including conserving scarce natural resources, keeping dangerous and toxic chemicals out of landfills where they can leach into the groundwater, and reducing methane emissions from landfills. In spite of these benefits, recycling has always had its detractors. In a notorious 1996 New York Times Magazine article, staff writer John Tierney argued that recycling programs wasted more resources than they saved. That turns out to be a spurious argument, but it is closer to true if the only averted costs considered are those associated with collecting garbage and hauling it to landfills (although, it seems fair to mention that no one has ever criticized garbage collection for not paying for itself). But averted disposal costs are only a tiny slice of the savings generated from recycling. The big savings come in the form of energy.
Energy is used throughout the entire lifecycle of consumer products, from extracting and processing the raw materials used, manufacturing the products themselves, distributing those products to retailers, and of course, collecting and processing or disposing of products once consumers no longer find them useful. Those first two phases—extracting/processing raw materials and manufacturing—are by far the most energy intensive, and that is where recycling can deliver big reductions.
Here are just a few examples:
The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that it takes 95% less energy to make aluminum from recycled inputs than it does to make it from raw materials. Making recycled steel saves 61%, recycled plastic saves between 57 and 75%, recycled newspaper 45%, and recycled glass 31%. The energy savings from recycling a ton of aluminum are equivalent to saving 36 barrels of oil and recycling just one can saves enough electricity to light a 25-watt CFL bulb for 14 hours.
Even though recycling programs have grown steadily over the years, there are still huge opportunities to capitalize on these energy savings.
According to the latest data from the U.S. EPA, we throw away more than 75 million tons of these core recyclable materials—aluminum, steel, plastic, paper and glass—in municipal solid waste each year. For the most part, over half of all these materials are wasted. Only paper is recycled in greater proportions than it is discarded. This means there are millions of tons of these easily recycled materials that still end up buried in landfills.
If we could divert just half of these materials for recycling, the results would be astronomical: a net energy savings of 1.5 quadrillion BTU, equivalent to 262 million barrels of oil or, more appropriately, as most of these savings come in avoided energy use in the manufacturing process, 6.7% of all coal consumption in the U.S. This avoided energy would be enough to power more than 14 million homes for a year.
(These numbers come from plugging in the U.S. EPA 2009 MSW Characterization data into the EPA’s Waste Reduction Model online calculator).
Fortunately, we know how to increase recycling rates to capture a larger share of these materials. On the residential side, unit-based or “pay-as-you-throw” (PAYT) collection programs create economic incentives for recycling by linking garbage collection costs to the amount thrown away while providing recycling for free or at dramatically lower cost. PAYT programs have been shown to significantly increase recycling, but, as of 2006, only 25% of Americans are covered by them. For municipal utilities that promote energy efficiency among their citizens, increasing recycling seems like an obvious extension of these efforts, and implementing a PAYT program is a great place to start.
Commercial recycling is also an area ripe for improvement. Most cities do not mandate commercial recycling, leaving it up to businesses to participate on a voluntary basis. California has begun taking steps to mandate commercial recycling statewide, and it is the first state to do so. Hopefully, other states will follow their lead.
Other state policy drivers, like landfill bans for core recyclable materials or state waste diversion goals that make funding for municipal waste management programs dependent on meeting them, can go a long way to increase recycling as well.
Also widely successful but politically controversial are container deposit laws, also known as “bottle bills.” According to the Container Recycling Institute, states with bottle bills have a beverage container recycling rate of around 60%, while non-deposit states only reach about 24%. Only ten states, covering 28% of the U.S. population have bottle bills on the books. Policymakers in the remaining 40 states—or even in Congress—could achieve meaningful energy savings by putting container deposit laws in place.
A more politically appealing approach similar in some ways to container deposit systems is product stewardship. Product stewardship requires producers to take greater responsibility for the lifecycle impacts of their products, including the costs and logistics of disposal or (preferably) collection for recycling. The benefit of product stewardship is that, in addition to achieving energy savings from greater levels of recycling, it also translates into cost savings for local governments and taxpayers, who no longer have to bear the burden of disposals costs for the products covered by the policy. Product stewardship for packaging has been highly effective at increasing packaging recycling, and could be used here at the state or national level to do the same.
Energy policy in the United States is very much in flux, and there are sharp disagreements about the best strategies, and even the goals, moving forward. However, reducing the energy intensity of our economy in the face of rising prices and for the sake of energy security and independence is a goal that should garner consensus. Recycling is a practice that can deliver real energy savings without diminishing (and perhaps even enhancing) our economic productivity and competitiveness. That is why recycling can and should be embraced by policymakers and advocates concerned about our energy future as a relevant and promising energy policy.
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McKenna Morriganis a Policy Fellow in AEL’s New Energy Leaders Project. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of AEL.
http://leadenergy.org/2011/04/why-recycling-is-an-energy-policy/
