I really only worry about recycling metal. Soda, canned goods, that sort of thing. I've been a bit skeptical of recycling paper since I started recycling, the trees used for paper are plentiful, and are grown as a crop. Plus, as far as I can understand all the same processes that it takes to make paper from tree pulp are also used when recycling paper, so that seems like a neutral process at best.
One other benefit to recycling other than reducing new material usage is keeping stuff out of landfills. Landfills are anaerobic, which means most bacteria that breaks stuff down can't live in them, so things break down extremely slowly[1]. That slow breakdown means we need more space for landfills, which are toxic environments. So even if the recycling process is neutral, or even somewhat more costly than producing new material, keeping stuff out of landfills is another benefit that you might not have considered in your calculation.
In addition, cities with recycling programs can actually sell the material they gather back to companies, literally turning garbage into money and creating a revenue source for the city[2,3]. One important component in this is that the cities can get a higher price for higher quality recycling streams, where the output is all composed of one type of material. This is why, even though St Paul is now single-sort, I still separate my paper from the other recycling. It helps keep the paper higher quality by avoiding getting it dirty and wet, and costs me no real effort.
I'm from a place where less than one percent of all household waste ends up in a landfill, so moving to the US and learning that most of my trash actually just goes on a dump somewhere was quite a shock to me. So why doesn't the US have more trash incinerators? It seems like such a no-brainer to me if you care about the environment?
Is burning trash better* than a landfill? Honestly asking, I don't know and this is something I'd love to be better educated about. Seems like you'd have lots of toxic fumes from burning, which may make it less of a no-brainer.
A combination of high temperature, gas residence time, and various scrubbing technologies can more or less solve the toxic emissions problem from incinerators. On the other hand, landfills will emit huge amounts of methane for decades, and at this point relatively few landfills are equipped to collect this gas.
From a strictly air quality-focused perspective (my professional area), I would say incinerators are usually better. I would guess that incinerators are also preferable from a soil and water quality perspective, but I can't say for sure.
"Is burning trash better* than a landfill? Honestly asking"
I don't know a lot about this, but I do know that the nordic countries all incinerate their trash, and do so with scrubbers/filters that negate the pollution coming out of the incinerator.
Word on the street is that the nordic countries do everything better than we do and are the bright shining example for all things urban progressivism ... so ... I guess it's the right thing to be doing :)
You can burn it cleanly, at sufficiently high temperatures. In the nordic countries, this heat is then going into city-wide central heating networks, meaning it substitutes natural gas or electricity for domestic heating.
The US (and the world in general, really) has a lot of open land. We're in no danger of reaching "peak landfill" anytime soon, and if/when we do, it will probably be feasible and cheaper to lift and launch waste into the sun instead of trying to recycle it.
Nice one, hadn't seen that particular article about the problem before. A hidden underlying detail in my comment is an assumption that such a waste crisis is so far in the future that we'll have things like space elevators (making getting to orbit easy) and solar sails (making reducing the starting earth-to-sun relative velocity doable in less than a year), though.
An awful lot of pulp wood comes out of managed woodlands. I'm not sure it is very comparable to growing a crop. The timescales for harvest are 30 and 40 years, and it's land that people think of as forests, not as plantations.
(there are certainly tree plantations that are very comparable to growing crops, it's just not the only source for pulp)
It's only 30-40 years if you go in and flatten it. Even in the northeast, as cold as it is, you can cut over the same piece of woods every 5-10 years, if you're the tiniest bit selective about it.
In the South, they have tree farms growing fast-growth eucalyptus hybrids that they can turn over even faster.
I wouldn't mind at all if the municipal recycling program took my recycling, sorted it, and routed the less valuable materials straight to the landfill based on current market conditions and analysis of all the criteria mentioned in the OP (cost of new materials, cost to recycle, carbon footprint, etc.). I put it out in one unsorted cart regardless and they have to sort it either way.
It has crossed my mind that they may already do this, either on the sly or per a policy in some terms I haven't read.
If they had more flexibility with the economics, maybe they could stop charging residents $6/month (the fee in my city for recycling pickup) to feel like we're doing the right thing.
