I welcome Brian Ellis' response to my posting on recycling electronic products, as it encourages a discussion of the issues. While I disagree with him at many points, I fully agree with his assertion "Above all, the holistic view must be considered". I take "holistic" to mean "identifying all the relevant factors and giving each a proper weight", and "view" to mean "analysis". That is exactly what I have been asking for from subscribers who favor coerced recycling. To emphasize this even further, I would add the word "rigorous".<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Brian criticizes the Gattuso report (  <http://www.cei.org/pdf/4386.pdf> http://www.cei.org/pdf/4386.pdf) for not giving the holistic view. I think that the report (with 121 footnotes) gives it much better his posting. 

For example, he says that Europe has far less space available for landfills than does the US. While this is no doubt true, the more important questions are whether Europe is actually running out of room, and how much of a difference would be made if ewaste were completely excluded from landfills. Brian, usually a source of lots of information, offers no substantiation for what he wants us to believe, so here are the facts. 

Gattuso presents US EPA data (p. 6) that ewaste constitutes only one percent of municipal solid waste in the US (presumably it is less than that in countries such as his with a lower standard of living). As for the amount of space needed, I have a calculation by Prof. Clark Wiseman of Gonzaga University showing (based on data from the Statistical Abstracts of the United States) that a single landfill 100 meters deep and about 50 km on a side could contain the municipal solid waste for the entire US at the current rate for 1000 years. (I'll send this calculation to anyone who requests it OFFLINE - please direct to my email address, not via this forum.)

I challenge Brian, or anyone else who really believes that there is a country that does not have enough room for landfills, to present the holistic view. Actually, this might be true for some very small countries - Monaco or Vatican City, for example - but I doubt that that is what Brian is referring to. 

Incidentally, in some cases, the most economical solution involves transporting the waste across a political boundary. So what? If the claim of danger to workers from ewaste is brought up again as an argument against allowing such cross-border transportation, let's have some facts - e.g., the number of workers who are being poisoned by it - and a consideration of whether there might be some solution other than paternalism. And I think that it has been pretty well established that landfilling does not result in leaching.

Brian refers to the "vast amounts" of energy needed to mine and refine copper, but not to the energy for recycling. For the analysis to be holistic, the cost - both monetary and environmental - of transport must be factored in. For ewaste, the cost of transporting for recycling is characteristically greater than the cost of just including it along with the rest of the municipal solid waste that has to be collected anyway for disposal. So you burn extra petroleum - a substance of great concern to Brian - to save some copper and glass. What's the holistic view here?

Brian claims that many of the materials making up an electronic product are "easily and economically recycled" and that "much recycling is already done and is economically viable". In a subsequent posting he provides a link to his web site that he says gives an example of self-supporting recycling. Consumers sort their trash and transport recyclable materials (not including ewaste) and garden debris to the nearest collection site. The recyclable material has enough value to a recycler to cover the cost of retrieving it and maintaining the collection site. (Ewaste is collected separately, but he does not mention the cost.) Disposal is discouraged by charging consumers a fee proportionate to the volume. (The EPA calls this "pay as you throw" (  <http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/payt/> http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/payt/) which - if it can be made to work without a lot of administrative overhead cost - seems to me to be a good idea in making things come out accurately.)

Brian's discussion doesn't look holistic to me, since it ignores the cost of the fuel burned by the consumers in delivering the material, and the value of their time. But no matter. Who could object to recycling that is voluntary (altruistic) or self-supporting (in which the consumer is compensated)? These need no government coercion - in fact, it would be difficult for government to prevent the latter. 

However, electronics recycling has to be subsidized because it is not economically feasible. It has to be coerced because the cost exceeds the average level of consumer altruism. It costs more than ten times as much to recycle e-waste than to send it to a landfill ($500/ton vs. $40/ton in the US according to Gattuso), so before Brian's claims about ease and economy can be accepted, they need substantiation. 

Many proponents of WEEE want to hide from consumers how much extra they are being charged for electronic products to pay for the program, apparently out of a concern that if the truth were known, there would be a strong protest. I hope that the truth does become known. A program that has to depend on secrecy or deception for its acceptance is not a good program.

Brian says "recycled materials cost about 90% of virgin materials for paper and cardboard". In a subsequent posting, he explains that he is referring to the situation in Europe and acknowledges the role of "environmental correctness" (his term for altruism!) in the equation. Perhaps he can compare the fuel costs associated with planting, harvesting, transporting, and grinding up trees vs. collecting, sorting, and processing used paper. (As Gerhard points out, the energy to grow the trees is free.) I reported in this forum some time back that in Baltimore one can buy paper with varying percentages of post-consumer content, from none (cheapest) to all (most expensive), commenting that this choice gives people a chance to show just how altruistic they are.

But of course, it isn't just altruism. Let's face it. Proponents of legislated recycling favor coercion: forcing their belief on people who disagree with them, purportedly for their own good or for the good of their descendants. And while they may claim, as Brian does, that the basis is concern for sustainability - "not wasting the earth's valuable resources" - their favoring of recycling even for renewable substances (paper from trees) gives them away. As I've said before, what the sustainability crowd refuses to address is how much privation people today should be forced to endure to provide for the needs of (a never stated number of) future generations, who will be forced to endure privation anyway. 

Those who like Brian are "very much pro-recycling where it is reasonably feasible" seem to have arrived at their beliefs by some process other than a cost-benefit analysis, i.e., without a rigorous holistic view. Who gets to decide what is "reasonably feasible" when reasonable people disagree? And how is mandatory recycling to be implemented without the "bureaucratic nightmare" that Brian acknowledges WEEE to be? 

I see a striking resemblance to using, depending on what can be achieved, attempts at coercion or appeals to emotion (in place of arguments based on facts) that have all too often been used to get people to accept a religion. Mike Fenner's anecdote about the professor who got shouted down for proposing a counter-intuitive analysis, and his comment about belief being stronger than reason are consistent with this. I'm glad that with this forum, there's no way to shout down unorthodox proposals.

Brian asserts that "a 10-year old kid could drive a horse and cart through a lot of what is said" in the Gattuso report. However, until its truth claims and arguments against the prevailing pro-recycling orthodoxy (an orthodoxy which has been reinforced by decades of propaganda) are countered with rigorous holistic arguments based on substantiating evidence, I think it wiser to accept them. Even if the report's issuing organization is suspect for its lack of impartiality.



Gordon Davy
Baltimore, MD
[log in to unmask]
410-993-7399



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