In discussing recycling (see e.g. The Case for Recycling here at RedStateEclectic), it is useful to take into account the below considerations.
Eight Great Myths of Recycling by Daniel K. Benjamin discusses amongst other things the following contention:
MYTH 5: WE SQUANDER IRREPLACEABLE RESOURCES WHEN WE
DON’T RECYCLE.
One argument made for recycling notes that we live on a finite
planet. With a growing population, we must, it seems, run out of
resources. Whether the resource in question is trees, oil, or bauxite,
the message is the same: The only way to extend the lives of natural
resource stocks is by more recycling.
In fact, we are not running out of natural resources. While recycling
has the potential to extend the lives of raw material stocks,
other activities, long practiced in the private sector, are already doing that.
Available stocks of those resources are actually growing,
and there is every reason to expect such growth to continue if the
private sector is allowed to continue performing its functions.
Consider forests. The amount of new growth that occurs each
year in forests exceeds by a factor of twenty the amount of wood
and paper that is consumed by the world each year (Lomborg 2001,
115). Perhaps partly as a result, temperate forests, most of which
are in North America, Europe, and Russia, actually have expanded
over the last 40 years.
True, losses of forest land are taking place in tropical forests,
where they are occurring at a rate of perhaps one percent per year
(Alston, Libecap, and Mueller 1999; Benjamin 1997b; Simpson, Sedjo,
and Reid 1996). But almost without exception, the ongoing losses
of forest lands around the world can be directly traced to a lack of
private property rights. Governments either have failed to protect
private property in forests or have encouraged people to treat forests
as common property.
In addition, governments have used forests,especially valuable
tropical forests, as an easy way to raise quick cash.
Wherever private property rights to forests are welldefined
and enforced, forests are either stable or growing (Benjamin
1997a; Deacon 1994, 1995, 1996, 1999). The world would be a
better place and we would have more forests if property rights to
forests were well defined and enforced, but more recycling of paper
or cardboard would not eliminate today’s forest losses (Benjamin
2003; Foster and Rosenzweig 2003, 633).
Trees are renewable, but what about nonrenewable resources
such as fossil fuel? Here, too, there is no reason to fear that we will
run out. At least three times in the twentieth century, the U.S.
Department of the Interior (or its predecessor, the Bureau of Mines)
predicted that America would run out of petroleum within 15 years
or less (Simon 1996, 165). It didn’t happen. Indeed, as we continue
to use more oil, the standard measures of proven oil reserves get
larger, not smaller.
The best way to measure the scarcity of natural resources such
as oil is to use the market prices of those resources. If the price of
a resource is going up over time, the resource is getting more scarce.
If the price is going down, it is becoming more plentiful.
Applying this measure to oil, we find that its price has exhibited
no long-term trend: Over the past 125 years, oil has become
no more scarce, despite our growing use of it. Moreover, reserves
of other fossil fuels are also growing, despite growing usage of them,
and although the costs of alternative energy sources (nuclear, solar,
wind, etc.) are far higher than fossil fuels, those costs are coming
down (Benjamin 1998; Chakravorty, Roumasset, and Tse 1997;
Lomborg 2001, 131).
It sounds like a paradox. We are using more resources and yet
they are becoming more available. What are we to make of this?
Human ingenuity is the ultimate explanation. Three factors enable
human ingenuity to make natural resources increasingly available:
prices, innovation, and substitution.
Prices, Innovation, and Substitution
The amount of proven reserves is not like the speed of light—
fixed by nature at some immutable number. Instead, proven reserves
reflect the amount of a resource that is recoverable at current
prices. When the price of a resource goes up, so does the incentive
to find more. Moreover, consumers also respond, conserving more
when the price rises. The key point is that when prices change,
consumers and producers change their behavior in response. The
conventional analysis that looks at current reserves or current
consumption patterns as being immutable will always produce incorrect
conclusions.
Thanks to numerous innovations, we now produce about twice
as much output per unit of energy as we did 50 years ago, and five
times as much as we did 200 years ago. Automobiles use only half as
much metal as in 1970, and optical fiber carries the same number of
calls as 625 copper wires did 20 years ago. Bridges are built with
less steel, because steel is stronger and improved engineering permits
the use of even less. Automobile and truck engines consume
less fuel per unit of work performed, and produce fewer emissions.
Packaging has been made both stronger and lighter, yielding less
breakage and consuming fewer resources. The list goes on and on,
and any analysis that forgets or ignores innovation will always produce
incorrect conclusions.
As a practical matter, everything can be done differently. Coal
can be burned for energy instead of wood, and oil instead of coal.
Cars and grocery bags can be made out of plastic instead of steel or
paper. Stockings can be made out of nylon instead of silk, and tank
armor made out of ceramics instead of steel. In each case, it is not
the substance that we demand, but the function it performs, and
many alternatives can perform the same or similar function.
None of this substitution is free, of course, or else the substitute
item would have been used first. But substitution is commonplace,
and human ingenuity seems always to be looking for ways to implement
it. Any analysis that forgets or ignores this principle of substitution
will always produce incorrect conclusions.
Other Resources, Too
Based on this reasoning and this information, we can conclude
that there is plenty of fossil fuel available for the foreseeable future.
What is true for energy is true for other resources. There is
no sign that humans will run out of resources in the foreseeable
future. Evidence of this is seen in the fact that prices of the vast
majority of industrial products have been falling over the last 150
years. Indeed, since 1845, the average price of raw materials has
fallen roughly 80 percent after adjusting for inflation (Brown and
Wolk 2000; Lomborg 2001, 137–48). And this is not a matter of a
price series being dominated by some obscure products. For the
24 top-selling non-energy products (e.g., aluminum, iron ore, and
cement) prices have declined an average of two-thirds over the
past century. Are we running out? It certainly doesn’t seem so.
Many life forms exist today in the quantities they do only because
humans use them, and thus have taken care to make sure they are
abundant. To return to the issue of forests, many trees in the U.S.
today exist only because there is a demand for virgin pulp made
from those trees. These trees will not be “saved” if recycling rates
rise; instead, the land on which they grow will be converted to some
other use. (A Wal-Mart parking lot? A corn field? A par-3 golf course?)
I am not claiming that all paper in the United States is made
from plantation tree stands. My point is that the desire to use natural
resources encourages people to conserve them and even, to
the extent possible, create more of them. Any view that ignores
this simple fact will always produce incorrect conclusions.
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