A recent study dispels all that your mother told you about recycling. It says that incineration is the best way to manage waste paper
recycling paper is not the best option to protect the environment. Say this to the archetypal "green" activist and you will be labelled "pro-industry" and insensitive to the environment. You are bound to be reminded that the forests -- especially the tropical rainforest -- are disappearing due to our everlasting greed for paper. In recent times, recycling has become the most prominent symbol of being "green". Numerous environmental groups swear by it. Recycling mollifies the ailing conscience of all those who want to do the "right thing" for the planet. In much of the western developed world, recycling has developed into an important industry, vehemently supported by hardline environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth ( foe ) and Greenpeace.
But several researchers have started questioning the effectiveness of recycling in protecting the environment. Matthew Leach is an energy policy analyst at the Centre for Environmental Technology at the Imperial College in London, uk . He decided to study the overall environmental costs of all the available options for waste paper management. The findings, published in November 1997, conclude that although recycling is a better option to manage waste paper than landfills, the best option is to burn the paper. Leach goes further, claiming that "the higher you value the environment, the better incineration comes out" ( New Scientist , Vol 156, No 2109).
The findings of Leach's study are in stark contrast to what several environmental groups have been propagating for the last two-three decades. They claim that to protect the environment, the best alternative is to reduce the use of a resource. The second best is to reuse it, recycling being the third in this "waste hierarchy". Beyond these three favourable options are two that are "not-so-preferable": incineration and landfilling. This set of preferences has become so acceptable in the West that it is imbibed in the European Commission's 1994 directive on waste management. The directive has set a target of 50 per cent of paper waste to be recovered and recycled by the year 2001.
Leach analysed five possible ways to manage waste paper: recycling to make a similar grade of paper, recycling to make a lower grade of paper, incineration that generates electricity, composting, and landfilling with the recovery of methane to generate electricity. Leach's team assessed the economic and environmental costs and benefits of each of the options. These included the advantages of valuable by-products, such as generation of electricity during incineration, as well as the hidden environmental costs such as emission of gases like carbon dioxide ( co 2 ), methane, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates. These were referred to as "externalities" by Leach.
The researchers added or subtracted the cash values of the externalities from each of these, the assumption being that the after the environmental externalities had been taken into account, the cheapest option would be the best way to manage the waste paper. But the problem in this was the scale for assigning cash values to the externalities. And this is exactly where Leach's study stands out.
Rather than assigning his own cash values to the externalities, Leach has considered a range of values assigned in other studies by environmentalists and economists. Using one set of studies where the values are low and another where they are high, he studied the way in which different valuations influence the choice of waste paper management. Leach's estimates are based on about 50 studies by several organisations, including the Swedish Environmental Agency, the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, usa , and the European Federation of Transport.
The issue of attaching values to externalities is severely disputed among environmental economists. Environmental costs of emitting one kg of co2 as posted by different estimates vary from us $1 to $50. Having taken these factors into consideration, Leach's study produced some remarkable findings. It seems obvious that studies by environmentalists, which give a high value to externalities, would give a high rank to recycling. At the same time, studies from the industry's viewpoint might minimise the externalities and would move away from recycling. Leach's findings, however, provide a very different picture.
According to Leach, studies that ascribe low value to externalities indicate that 80 per cent of waste should be recycled. But when high values are attached to externalities, he says that two-thirds of paper waste should be incinerated, with remaining quantity of paper either composted or landfilled. The sum of this is that recycling is preferable if economic sense prevails over environmental costs. However, incineration is the better option if environmental concerns are high on your agenda.
An important factor in incineration being "greener" than recycling is the value of the electricity generated during the process of burning. Another is that recycling uses a great deal of energy and causes a lot of pollution. Leach cites the example of Aylesford Newsprint recycling mill in Kent, uk , which receives 30,000 truck deliveries of waste paper every year from all across England. This amounts to a total average journey of four million km every year. This leads to 5,800 tonnes of co2 emissions per year, according to Leach's estimates. Besides, the recycling process itself uses a lot of energy. The Aylesford plant, for example, used 4,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil and 5,700 megajoules of gas in 1996. The de-inking process in particular uses large amounts of energy. It also produces a sludge that comprises numerous toxins with high concentrations of heavy metals that have to be buried in landfills.
Incineration, on the other hand, produces energy. This leads to a net gain for the environment as it substitutes the electricity generated by burning of fossil fuels. Incineration plants can also supply heat generated from waste to neighbouring residences, offices and factories. Incinerators certainly cause air pollution -- particularly dioxins, which are produced when some chlorine compounds are burned. But Leach is of the opinion that tough new rules on emissions will minimise the adverse health effects from incineration. Moreover, Leach argues, if the wood from which paper is generated is replaced by new trees, then those trees will absorb the same amount of co2 that is emitted from the burning of paper.
The International Institute of Environment and Development (iied), London, had prepared a report in 1996 that echoed Leach's findings. Richard Sandbrook, director, iied , and formerly an active member of foe , says that much of the thinking on recycling is fundamentally misguided because "environmentalists refuse to countenance any argument which undermines their sacred cow". Anna Thomas, the current waste campaigner of the foe , disagrees with the findings of the iied. She says that in the iied study, life-cycle analyses "may be over simplified or do not use adequate data".
In such a backdrop, Leach's findings are bound to stir the hornet's nest. Whatever the outcome of this debate, one hopes that the environment is the winner.
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