Garbage In, Garbage Out.(John Tierney's article "Recycling is garbage")(Brief Article)

JOHN TIERNEY'S BEST-KNOWN PIECE, "Recycling Is Garbage," was somewhat recycled itself. The piece drew heavily on the work of a number of anti-recycling think tanks, among them the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, and the Waste Policy Center. These groups are heavily subsidized by industry. As Richard A. Denison and John F. Ruston of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) pointed out in their rebuttal of Tierney's article, "Many of the corporations that fund the anti-recyclers have a direct economic stake in maintaining the waste management status quo and in minimizing consumers' scrutiny of the environmental effects of products and packaging."

Tierney was cautious to include disclaimers in "Recycling Is Garbage," the most significant being his reasonable-sounding admission that "Recycling does sometimes make sense--for some materials in some places at some times." And much of the article's effect depends on a combination of on-site reporting, philosophical rumination, media criticism, pop psychology, and even literary allusion. For example, Tierney develops an erudite neocon analogy to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, suggesting the spiritual bereftness of sorting through garbage ("muckraking") when we should be gazing skyward to the "Celestial City" of human progress and ingenuity, as Tierney's idol Julian Simon did. Without this techno-optimist undercurrent, "Recycling Is Garbage" would be a very different article. Tierney's literary touch is what makes his writing so disarming. Nevertheless, Tierney's article was factually misleading on a number of counts:

Curbside pickups. In a lengthy section of "Recycling Is Garbage," Tierney targeted New York City's recycling program as a financial sinkhole: "Every time a Sanitation Department crew picks up a load of bottles and cans from the curb, New York City loses money. The recycling program consumes resources." But this ignores two crucial facts that largely take away the force of Tierney's point: (1) Regular garbage trucks also consume resources and (2) the more materials recycled, the less garbage will have to be picked up--which ultimately conserves the city's resources.

Forest depletion. Tierney also took on the environmentalist dictum that recycling saves trees, writing: "Yes, a lot of trees have been cut down to make today's newspaper. But even more trees will probably be planted in their place. America's supply of timber has been increasing for decades." He went on to quote a Cato Institute source who claimed that "paper ...