Recently, as I was about to throw a piece of paper into a trash can, an environmentally sensitive colleague of mine admonished me.
“I hope you’re going to recycle that.”
Doing my best to approximate the moral presumptuousness of those who lecture others about their responsibilities to the rock we call home, I responded, “Why would I do that? Don’t you care about the environment?”
As you might expect — and as I had hoped — a discussion about the relative merits of recycling and throwing away paper promptly ensued.
My colleague informed me that I should recycle the paper I use because paper constitutes a large proportion of the waste that makes up landfills — which, she assured me, are increasing so rapidly in size that we are running out of space for them.
She also told me of the detrimental effects landfills could potentially have on our groundwater supply, into which various toxins from our trash might seep.
After acknowledging that there are certainly downsides to throwing away paper, I asked her a question once posed by University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg: If we found out a way to recycle beef, wouldn’t the population of cattle decrease?
My point was that, contrary to the dogma most people of a certain age have been force-fed, one of the best ways to increase the number of trees on the planet is to consume more paper.
This is because consuming paper puts upward pressure on demand for it and thus for trees, many of which are grown in vast quantities on plantations maintained by the paper industry.
By pointing this out, I meant to demonstrate that it is possible to promote pro-environment causes even while eschewing the rituals environmentalists assure us are moral obligations.
That said, I only make sure to throw my paper in the trash because I have a mild aesthetic preference for having a few more trees in the world, not because I am under the sway of those who preach the absolute need for ever more trees.
If paper plantations proliferate to the point that I think there are getting to be too many trees in the world, then I’ll probably start recycling paper again.
After considering my interlocutor’s arguments about the contribution of paper to landfill waste, however, I concluded that she and I simply had differing preferences and that we were both doing what made sense in order to promote our respective goals.
Then I recalled having come across some research compiled by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg that seriously calls into question the basis for harboring much concern about the proliferation of landfills.
As he notes in his book “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” if we were to place all of the trash that will be generated in the United States over the course of the next century in one landfill and pile it just 100 feet high (which is shorter than some existing landfills on the East Coast), it would all fit in a square just 18 miles on a side, which amounts to 0.009 percent of the country’s land area.
This estimate is based on projections of a population increase and waste generation increases that are likely to be higher than the actual rises, so our waste will probably take up even less room than that.
Additionally, Lomborg dismisses the concern about the health threats posed by landfills by noting that the EPA estimates landfills will cause some 5.7 cancer-related deaths during the next 300 years — which works out to one every 50 years.
In light of these facts, it is clear that there is little to fear from throwing paper in the trash.
On the other hand, one could argue that I am doing little good for the world’s tree population by throwing away paper because my personal effect on demand for paper will be fairly small. And that might be so.
Nevertheless, because my preference for an increased tree population is stronger than my practically nonexistent fear of running out of room for trash (or getting cancer from a landfill), I am going to continue throwing paper away instead of recycling it.
The most important lesson from all of this is not that we actually have plenty of room for our trash, that our landfills are not going to kill us or that recycling paper is unwise if you want to have more trees.
Rather, it is that, contrary to the propaganda so many of us encounter over the course of our education, it is entirely appropriate for us to make our own decisions regarding our habits of resource usage on the basis of our own preferences.