WHY do we recycle? Frank Ackerman, a professor of environment policy at Tufts
University in Medford, Massachusetts, used this question as the title of a book
published earlier this year. Recycling, he concluded, 鈥渋s one of the most
accessible, tangible symbols of the commitment to do the right thing鈥�. In the
US, more people recycle than vote. It is 鈥渁 religion鈥�, writes Ackerman, 鈥渋n a
society that produces goods far more readily than satisfying beliefs鈥�.
In Britain, one veteran green goes further. Richard Sandbrook, director of
the London-based independent research group, the International Institute for
Environment and Development (IIED), says that much thinking on recycling is
fundamentally misguided because 鈥渆nvironmentalists refuse to countenance any
argument which undermines their sacred cow鈥�. He cites new research which turns
on its head the conventional wisdom about the recycling of paper and other
wastes鈥攚isdom that has become accepted by environmentalists, governments
and industry alike throughout the West.
The authors of this revisionist work call for a root-and-branch reappraisal
of the value of recycling as a means of waste paper management. The message is
this: if you value your environment, don鈥檛 put this magazine in the paper bank
once you have read it. The green option is to burn it.
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Used paper is fast becoming the main raw material worldwide for a business
that accounts for 2.5 per cent of all industrial output. In much of Western
Europe, more than half of all newsprint is already recycled. The Western world鈥檚
huge paper disposal industry鈥攚hich each year handles some 130 kilograms
per head in Europe and double that in North America鈥攊s being rebuilt on
the premise that recycling is best. But even as recycling takes over,
economists, business analysts and ecologists are starting to ask hard
questions.
Hierarchy heresy
One leading inquisitor is Matthew Leach, an energy policy analyst at the
Centre for Environmental Technology at Imperial College, London. With his
colleagues, he set out to discover the overall environmental cost of the various
waste paper management options. In a study published this month in the
International Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, they
conclude that recycling is better than Britain鈥檚 favourite option, landfilling,
but that it is usually markedly worse than incineration. Moreover, says Leach,
鈥渢he higher you value the environment, the better incineration comes out鈥�.
This finding comes as a shock to environmentalists brought up with the
teachings of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. They advocate a 鈥渨aste
hierarchy鈥�, where the best option is to reduce the use of a resource, next best
is reuse and failing that, recycling. After these three 鈥済ood鈥� options come two
鈥渂ads鈥濃�攊ncineration and landfilling. Such thinking has also been adopted
by Western governments. It is, for example, enshrined in the European
Commission鈥檚 directive on waste management, which in 1994 set a target for 50
per cent of paper waste to be recovered and recycled by the year 2001.
Leach鈥檚 study analysed five possible fates for waste paper: recycling to make
a similar grade of paper, recycling to make a lower grade, incineration with
energy generation, composting, and landfilling with the recovery of methane to
generate energy. The researchers then explored the economic and environmental
gains and losses from each of these methods. These include the benefits of
valuable by-products, such as the sale of electricity generated during
incineration, but also the hidden environmental costs, so-called 鈥渆xternalities鈥�
such as carbon dioxide, methane, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen
oxides and particulates. Cash values for these were then added to, or subtracted
from, the costs of each method. The assumption is that the cheapest option,
after the environmental externalities have been taken into account, is the best
disposal route.
The unique feature of Leach鈥檚 work is that he does not assign his own cash
values to the externalities. Instead, he looks at the range of values assigned
in other studies by environmental economists. Then, using one set of studies
where the values are low and another where they are high, he assesses how
different valuations influence the choice of best disposal route. The final
analysis is based on around 50 studies by various organisations ranging from the
Swedish Environmental Protection Agency to the Argonne National Laboratory in
Illinois and the European Federation for Transport.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, economists disagree violently about what cash
values to apply to pollutants. This is a very inexact science. Published
environmental costs of emitting a kilogram of carbon dioxide range from
$1 to more than $50. In some cases, the environmental cost makes
up almost half the cost of paper disposal as calculated using Leach鈥檚
method.
Leach鈥檚 work has produced remarkable conclusions about the best disposal
route for waste paper. Environmentalists would confidently expect that their
studies, which tend to give a high value to environmental externalities, would
push the balance in favour of recycling. Business analysts, on the other hand,
might minimise the value of externalities, assuming that this would undermine
the arguments for recycling. Far from it.
In Leach鈥檚 analysis, studies which value externalities at a low level
typically suggest that 80 per cent of the waste should be recycled (the
remainder, the poorest quality and most contaminated paper waste such as food
wrappings, is useless for recycling and is landfilled). But when externalities
are given high values, the study concludes that two-thirds of waste paper should
be incinerated, with the remaining poorer grades of paper divided between
composting and landfilling. The lesson is that recycling paper makes economic
sense if you downplay the environmental costs. But if you care about the
environment, incineration wins.
One reason for this surprising finding, says Leach, is the value of energy
generated by incineration. Another is that recycling uses large amounts of
energy and creates pollution, especially when waste paper is transported to
recycling mills. For example, the Aylesford Newsprint recycling mill in Kent
(see 鈥淧aper Chase鈥�) receives 30 000 truck deliveries of waste paper a year from right
across England, with a total annual journey of more than 4 million kilometres.
According to Leach鈥檚 calculations, this would account for more than 5800 tonnes
of CO2 emissions per year. Then there are the trips made by individual
recyclers from their homes to the neighbourhood recycling bin. One study in
rural Norfolk found that cars travelled 270 kilometres for every tonne of waste
posted in local bins.
Industrial irony
On top of all the motor fuel, the recycling process itself uses energy. The
Aylesford plant, for instance, used 4000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil and 5700
million megajoules of gas last year, even with on-site energy and heat
recycling. The de-inking process is particularly energy-hungry and ultimately
produces a toxic sludge containing high concentrations of heavy metals, which
must be placed in landfill sites.
Incineration, by contrast, generates energy. Most modern plants have their
boilers hooked up to turbines and feed the national grid. The local government鈥檚
Edmonton incinerator in north London, for example, can produce as much
electricity as a 20-megawatt power station for the national grid. Some plants,
particularly in Scandinavia, also supply waste heat to neighbouring offices,
homes or factories. As with recycling plants, waste is mostly delivered to
incinerators by road. But because incinerators also handle much of the rest of
domestic refuse, Leach says that they are usually sited closer to the waste
source and so generate far less traffic.
True, incinerators produce air pollution. Dioxins, created when some chlorine
compounds burn, excite environmental campaigners. But tough new rules on
incinerator emissions were introduced in Britain last year, and Leach accepts
the view of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution that these will
effectively eliminate the impact on health of incineration. CO2 too is
often seen as an evil by-product of incineration. If all British municipal waste
(including paper) were incinerated, this would increase national emissions of
the greenhouse gas by some 3 per cent. But, says Leach, if the wood from which
the paper was originally made was replaced by new trees, then those trees would
suck up the same amount of carbon dioxide as is emitted when the paper is
burnt.
And the evidence is that most paper is produced this way. Contrary to popular
myth, only 1 per cent of paper worldwide comes from tropical rainforests. About
two-thirds comes from pulp plantations or heavily managed natural forests,
mostly in industrialised countries. The big four paper and board exporters are
Canada, Finland, Sweden and the US. In all these countries, forest cover is
increasing. In Finland鈥檚 forests, for instance, annual growth is estimated at 85
million cubic metres鈥攕ome 30 million cubic metres more than the depletion
through logging and natural losses. As a result, the incineration cycle is
鈥淐翱2 苍别耻迟谤补濒鈥�.
Green gains
What鈥檚 more, if incineration is then used to generate energy, it leads to a
net gain for the environment, because it substitutes for the pollution caused by
burning fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, in conventional power stations.
Leach estimates that every tonne of paper incinerated in the UK saves roughly
300 kilograms of CO2 emissions.
Set against that should be the fossil fuels burnt to produce new paper. Leach
agrees that production of virgin paper uses about a quarter more energy than
recycling old paper. But he points out that 鈥渕ost modern Scandinavian pulp
mills, from which Britain gets most of its paper, do not burn fossil fuels at
all. They burn wood chips and bark.鈥� This fuel is regrown locally, so these
mills make no net contribution to global warming. Taking this into account,
Leach reckons that 鈥渋n terms of fossil energy used to supply a tonne of paper in
the UK, virgin paper accounts for roughly half as much energy as recycled
paper鈥濃�攍eaving aside the extra fuel burned in collecting paper for
recycling.
Leach鈥檚 findings about waste paper management are echoed in a report
published last year by the IIED. The work reviews a series of economic and
environmental studies of the life cycle of paper, and concludes that 鈥渕ost of
the available studies find that, in some circumstances, incineration can have
environmental advantages over recycling鈥�.
The IIED report also warns of the environmental dangers of reducing
consumption of virgin paper. It is true that some forestry practices, even in
environmentally minded Scandinavia, are far from perfect. But, says the report,
a decline in demand for new wood is likely to lead to falling standards of
forestry management. After all, why look after a forest you may never be able to
profit from. In Finland, timber companies are already allowing plantations to
die off, and they blame the policy on increased levels of recycling within the
European Union.
So why do governments and environmentalists continue to push recycling?
Friends of the Earth has the longest track record of support for recycling. It
made its first headlines 25 years ago by dumping nonreturnable bottles on the
doorstep of their distributor, Schweppes, and demanding that they be recycled.
In those days, Sandbrook was one of the pressure group鈥檚 three full-time
officials. Now, as director of the IIED, he says 鈥渙ur study concludes that
certain green campaigns were plainly misguided鈥�.
And he finds himself at loggerheads with Friends of the Earth鈥檚 current waste
campaigner Anna Thomas. Her latest briefing on waste for local activists rejects
the IIED鈥檚 findings on the grounds that life-cycle analyses 鈥渕ay be
oversimplified or do not use adequate data鈥�. The briefing goes on to back
recycling against incineration because the latter causes pollution, 鈥渨astes鈥� a
valuable resource, tends to encourage the production of waste and, in a
splendidly circular argument, 鈥渞epresents a barrier to increased recycling鈥�.
Governments seem to have followed the environmentalist line almost blindly.
鈥淭he EU鈥檚 waste hierarchy was never based on any analysis, but was more an
article of faith,鈥� says David Pearce. He was a British government environment
adviser in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when many of the key decisions were
being taken, and is now director of the Centre for Social and Economic Research
on the Global Environment at University College London.
Outright opposition from environmentalists, meanwhile, is undermining plans
for new incinerators and efforts to hook existing plants up to power generators.
Such opposition helped persuade PowerGen, Britain鈥檚 second largest power
generating company, to announce last December that it was pulling out all
investment from 鈥渨aste-to-energy鈥� schemes. 鈥淭his leaves a gaping void of
investment into new incinerators,鈥� wrote one commentator in the industry journal
Waste Manager. In particular, PowerGen has scuppered plans to generate
power from a proposed incinerator at Belvedere in southeast London and to
convert an existing power station at Kingsnorth in Kent to burning municipal
waste.
Deafening silence
As Britain and much of the Western world lurches on towards what Sandbrook
describes as further massive investment in ill-conceived recycling schemes, the
implications of the new findings need to be thought through carefully. They
certainly extend far beyond the paper industry. Work on the life cycles of other
wastes, carried out by Pearce鈥檚 researchers, has concluded that large transport
distances to recycling plants, plus the energy used in sorting waste and
distributing the recovered materials, 鈥渃an quickly undermine the benefits of
recycling鈥�. In many cases, for noncombustible waste, the best disposal method
may be landfilling.
Leach says that 鈥渞eusing glass bottles can use more energy than initial
manufacture, since dirty bottles have to be sterilised鈥�. Since glass is made
from sand, one of the world鈥檚 most abundant resources, a better use for old
bottles might be to crush them and combine them with other materials to make
aggregate.
Yet anyone who questions the sacred cow of recycling risks opprobrium or,
perhaps worse, a deafening silence. Sandbrook complains that over the past year,
environmental groups have all but ignored his IIED report. This summer, in an
attempt to provoke a response, he hit out in the influential environmental
journal Green Futures. 鈥淥ne wonders sometimes,鈥� he wrote, 鈥渋f the
environmental lobby really cares about the efforts being made to get to grips
with sustainability.鈥�
The result? 鈥淢ore silence,鈥� says Sandbrook. 鈥淚 really don鈥檛 know if green
campaigners agree with it, disagree with it, or are just bored by it.鈥�
* * *
Paper chase
EVER wondered what happens to your
old papers after you post them through the slot in the recycling bin? In
Britain, one in five recycled newspapers and magazines ends up in the Kent
village of Aylesford. Here, at Europe鈥檚 largest recycled newsprint mill, 450 000
tonnes of newspaper is treated annually.
The scale of the operation is impressive. The plant receives 30 000 truck
deliveries each year. Once inside the mill the paper is first soaked in water to
make a pulp, treated with soap and solvents to remove ink, and then screened,
spun and further treated to remove staples, plastics, glue and grit. Cleaned-up
pulp is finally reformed into paper on a colossal machine that turns out a
constant stream of newsprint 9 metres wide at a speed of 100 kilometres per
hour.
Almost one in every 20 tonnes of newsprint used in Europe comes from this one
plant. It feeds Rupert Murdoch鈥檚 presses at Wapping in east London, and many
others in Britain, Scandinavia and Germany. On average, the complete cycle from
mill to printing press, newsagent, breakfast table, recycling bin and back to
the mill takes about 14 days.