Sustainability of Recycling
Vincent R. Bond
DeVry University
English 135
January 28, 2013

For years recycling has been going on and still today there has been no true reduction of the amount of waste that people produce throughout the years. Even though waste materials are recycled into new products there are several negative effects also for both consumers and the environment. Every neighborhood that you drive through now have more than one garbage can, one for regular garbage and one for recycling and most times there is a fee to the county or an Home Owners Association(HOA) that the American homeowner must pay whether they are recycling or not. According to reporter John Tierney, who wrote a story for New York Times magazine, “Recycling is Garbage”. With this said the sustainability of recycling is economically unfeasible due to the expense and the damage done to the environment. The expense of collecting and recycling materials are very high compared to just disposing of it as garbage. According to author Harvey Black of the Environmental Health Perspectives Journal, in San Jose, California “it costs $28 per ton to landfill waste compared with $147 a ton to recycle” (Black 1006). Since there are no machines that can easily handle recycling the time and money spent recycling is higher than actually disposing of waste. When looking at the price to produce material from recycled waste also shows that it cost the tax payers more money for this new product. When all of this is taken into account where do we really see the benefit, when the expense for recycling can be better spent on teachers, or other civil servants?
Recycling is also doing harm to the environment since it releases pollutant back into the air. Even though this may be less than creating products from raw material, fossil fuels are still being burned by the delivery trucks and the