>>99146128the energy and effort consumed in sorting and collecting recycling separately exceeds the value preserved by doing so.
If an American's time is worth $10/hr, then 1 minute spent sorting garbage is equivalent to $0.16. let's say you can sort/divert half a kilogram of aluminum waste (66 drink cans) out of your garbage in 15 minutes, including the marginal cost of taking an additional can out to the curb etc (Aluminum is not a great representative; plastic recycling is much less efficient and paper recycling is basically a joke, but let's stick with aluminum for now)
that's $2.40 of time and effort expended.
Stanford says recycling a ton of aluminum saves 14000 kwh (
https://lbre.stanford.edu/pssistanford-recycling/frequently-asked-questions/frequently-asked-questions-benefits-recycling ). 1 ton is 1000 kg, so you'd save 14 kwh of energy, which puts your valuation for the energy at $0.17/kwh, which is quite high for energy. (note we're talking energy, not electricity)
But it gets worse! Someone had to drive a recycling truck to pick up your recycling, and while separated recycling systems do reduce the need for trash trucks to some degree, virtually nobody argues that it saves net truck-miles or trashman-hours. I don't have good numbers on it but I suspect a marginal cost of some amount.
Now there are benefits; you are reducing total landfill usage. That ain't nothing. I'll assume that the marginal increase in trashmen is offset entirely by the decrease in landfill needed.
But that was for Aluminum given what I feel are relatively generous assumptions. a ton of recycled plastic saves ~6000 kwh. a ton of newsprint? ~600. a ton of glass? _42_ kwh.
A good rebuttal of my point would argue either than my assumptions are wrong (possible; I'm not an expert) or that the efficient market hypothesis is wrong and that time, money, and energy don't have an equivalence defined by the market price for each. That would be a hard argument to prove.
