ing more competitive manufacturing industries. Like burying trash in landfills or burning it in incinerators, recycling also costs money. Assessing society's interest in recycling requires a full appraisal of the environmental and economic benefits and costs of recycling, in comparison with the one-way consumption of resources and disposal of used products and packaging in landfills and incinerators. When all of these factors are taken into account, the overwhelming advantages of recycling are apparent.Recycling cuts pollution and conserves natural resources. The greatest environmental benefits of recycling are related not to landfills, but to the conservation of energy and natural resources and the prevention of pollution in manufacturing that result from the use of recycled rather than virgin raw materials. Recovered materials have already been refined and processed once, so manufacturing the second time around is usually much cleaner and less energy-intensive than the first. Detailed analysis shows that these environmental benefits of recycling far outweigh any additional environmental burdens resulting from the collection, processing and transport of recyclable materials in curbside recycling programs. Franklin Associates recently examined the lifecycle environmental impacts of recycling the aluminum cans, glass bottles, newspapers, tin-coated steel cans and plastic soda bottles and milk jugs collected in a typical residential curbside program. Collecting, processing, transporting and manufacturing new products with recovered materials results in less release of air and water pollutants, and less solid waste, than does acquiring and using virgin raw materials in manufacturing. Moreover, releases from recycling were considerably lower than those from landfilling in all pollutant categories, and were lower than those from incineration in almost all categories.Recycling conserves energy. Much less energy is needed to make recycl...
