NOW I KNOW we are living in a new age. Electing Republican majorities in the House and Senate was nice, but it didn't approach the epochal significance of this -- the Wall Street Journal has debunked recycling!
If there is any issue on which millions of people have been more hoodwinked, I don't know what it might be. The propaganda machine urging us to recycle has been relentless, moralistic and, according to the Journal, utterly misleading.
Listen up, Captain Planet, Barney the Dinosaur, Mr. Rogers and the rest of you commissars. Your arguments in favor of curbside recycling turn out to be, ahem, garbage.
The recent boom for curbside recycling got started after the famous garbage barge floated around the waters of the eastern United States unsuccessfully looking for a place to unload its cargo of trash. News coverage at the time left the impression that the barge was forced to bounce from one port to the next because our dumps were too full. Walter Hang, a New York environmentalist, told Phil Donahue that "this barge really dramatizes the nationwide crisis we face with garbage disposal."
But as the Journal's Jeff Bailey reveals, the garbage barge was rejected not because there was insufficient dump capacity along the eastern seaboard -- in fact, thousands of tons of trash from the Northeast, sent by train, are dumped in the southern United States every week. This is the truth, according to the Journal: The mobsters who organized the garbage barge had not nailed down a destination when they put out to sea. Owners of dumps were suspicious that the trash might contain hazardous waste and so refused to accept it.
By the time the garbage barge landed back in Brooklyn, a myth had been born -- that the United States was up to its eyeballs in trash and facing an emergency. Environmentalists stoked this misconception -- and so did industry. As Mr. Bailey points out, there were a great many people in the trash business who were in a position to explain the truth about dump capacity in the United States (the U.S. Conference of Mayors says that cities have, on average, 16.5 years of capacity remaining, and others believe that to be a low estimate), but they chose to go along with the panic instead. "The public's belief in a garbage crisis," writes Mr. Bailey, "helped WMX [formerly Waste Management Inc.] and its competitors pass along huge price increases to municipalities."
The Environmental Protection Agency weighed in with a report in 1988 called "The Solid Waste Dilemma," which urged states and cities to devise voluntary recycling programs. One of the authors of the EPA research said later that he never did understand the political use EPA had made of the data. "I've always wondered where that crap about a landfill capacity crisis came from," he told the Wall Street Journal.
And so the race to reduce garbage through recycling was on. Forty states passed laws to encourage recycling, and many cities subsidized it. According to polls, 77 percent of the public believes that trash is our No. 1 environmental problem.
But it's not true. Not only is the belief that we are running out of landfill (a strange idea to anyone who has ever flown over this continent) mistaken, but the solution to the non-problem is problematical itself. Curbside recycling is extremely expensive. Funds spent on recycling are not spent on police, schools or fire departments. The trucks required to pick up the cans and bottles spew pollution into the atmosphere and burn fossil fuels. Before curbside recycling got started, California was recycling about 50 percent of its newspapers. After curbside recycling, the percentage went up to 60. That's a huge expense for such a low return.
Thank you, Wall Street Journal, for telling the truth. But I have my doubts as to whether the truth will dent the armor of the righteous propagandists in charge of children's television.
Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist.