Indianapolis Recycling

Residents need better information

Introduction

It was recently reported that residential curbside recycling won’t become universal in Indianapolis until 2028. We’re not sure that this is as bad a thing as various activists and members of the Indianapolis City-County Council (“the Council”) seem to think. Independently of whether the city’s residential curbside recycling ever becomes universal, though, the environmental benefits of residential recycling may not justify the time the city’s households spend on it. After outlining some of the local-government deliberations on the matter this post will therefore show why residents need better information about how meager those benefits really are.

Background

Indianapolis’s Department of Public Works (“DPW”) reported at the January 8, 2025, meeting of the Indianapolis Board of Public Works (“the Board”) that a waste-to-energy outfit called ReWorld burns 60–70% of Indianapolis residential waste. Much of the remaining residential waste is sent to landfills, but some is instead recycled, and a presentation given by the DPW’s Office of Sustainability (“the Office”) at the first of three successive meetings that the Council’s Environmental Sustainability Committee (“the Committee”) directed in 2023 to curbside recycling stated that the percentage of the city’s residential waste currently diverted for recycling is about 7%. The Office further stated that because some of the diverted material turns out not to be recyclable the percentage that’s actually recycled is only 5–6%.

Much of the diverted material currently comes from residents who take their recycling to collection stations located around the city, but some is collected curbside from residents who’ve chosen to pay extra for that service. The Office estimated that the residential-waste percentage diverted for recycling would increase from 7% to 12% if residential curbside collection were made universal, as the Office told the Committee in those curbside-recycling meetings that by 2026 it would be.

Why the Delay?

The reason for the delay is something about which we can only speculate; with regard to waste disposal the DPW has not been a model of transparency. Indeed, a moment akin to “pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” occurred when the ReWorld contract came up without notice at that January 8^th meeting. Citing non-disclosure agreements that purportedly extended to aspects of the contract’s background, the DPW largely declined a request to explain why Indianapolis would persist in burning trash for another ten years. It merely stated that since the Office of Sustainability had been involved in the decision process the Board could rest assured that environmental factors had been given due consideration. At the Committee’s January 25, 2025, meeting the Office then pleaded non-disclosure agreements itself.

But perhaps a hint at the reason for the holdup can be found in a requirement suggested during the second of those three 2023 curbside-recycling meetings by Committee member Michael-Paul Hart. The requirement he suggested was that curbside recycling pay for itself: regular trash pickup and curbside recycling together should cost no more than regular trash pickup would alone. Although at the third of those meetings trash haulers Republic Industries and WM (né Waste Management) voiced aspirations to meet that requirement they also expressed uncertainties.

Specifically, WM emphasized that providing the necessary facilities by 2026 would require a fair amount of advance notice. And a Republic video emphasized a slackening in the market for recovered materials. Low petroleum costs had reduced the values of many recyclables, it said, to the extent that the cost of recycling glass had begun to exceed its commodity value. Meanwhile, packaging’s continued “lightweighting” was increasing the amount of processing that recovering a given amount of material required. And Republic mentioned its hope that government grants might help. Perhaps these factors had something to do with the slippage; maybe trash haulers weren’t yet ready to meet Mr. Hart’s requirement.

The Hart Requirement

Or maybe there’s some other reason. But that requirement is worth mentioning because it turned up in another guise when we surveyed the work of the Duke University professor who answered a question we raised in a recent post about tariffs. In “For Most Things, Recycling Harms the Environment” Prof. Michael Munger put it this way:

I have sometimes suggested a test for whether something is garbage or a valuable commodity. Hold it in your hand, or hold a cup of it, or tank, or however you can handle it. Consider: Will someone pay me for this? If the answer is yes, it’s a commodity, a valuable resource. If the answer is no, meaning you have to pay them to take it, then it’s garbage.

If the trash haulers can’t at least break even by selling what they recover from residents’ recycle bins then on balance such material is garbage and should have just gone out with the regular trash. So it is devoutly to be hoped that Mr. Hart’s requirement can be met when the DPW makes curbside recycling universal.

Perverse Incentives

Or at least it is if we don’t take into account the values of residents’ time and the effects that some say the avoided carbon-dioxide emissions would otherwise have on the environment. Those factors complicate the question enough that we won’t attempt to resolve it here. But they also bring us to this post’s point: that residents are probably wasting much of the time they spend on recycling and that various institutions have incentives to encourage this waste or at least not to discourage it.

One such incentive could be inferred from the third curbside-recycling meeting, in which the trash haulers emphasized that satisfying Mr. Hart’s requirement will depend on residents’ not only diverting the right kind of material but also making sure that it’s loose, clean, and dry. In essence, that is, satisfying the Hart requirement will depend on obtaining free labor from residents. And the trash haulers went into some detail about the “education” efforts the they’ll employ to obtain that free labor.

Those scare quotes reflect our belief that the haulers aren’t likely to tell residents how inflated most people’s views of recycling’s benefits are. Symptomatic of such views are spectacles such as one Prof. Munger recounted: “I once watched a young woman in Vitacura, Chile, wait in line in her idling auto for more than 10 minutes so she could park and put two two-liter plastic bottles into a recycle bin.” Trash haulers have no incentive to discourage such excesses.

Nor do the companies that buy the material the trash haulers recover. When a Committee member asked at the second recycling meeting whether to remove labels from bottles and cans before depositing them in the recycle bin a Richmond, Indiana, plastics recycler responded, “We would love for you to take the label off.”

“That’s good to know,” said the member, “just because . . . it’s going to take all of us to have the impact that we need to have, so even individual things that individual homeowners and recyclers can do is always helpful to know.”

True, removing a label may take only, say, five or ten seconds. But over time those seconds add up to minutes and hours, and we’ll see below that even an hour’s worth of such effort is unlikely to provide much more than a single dollar’s worth of environmental benefit. Compare that with the value of time spent reading to a preschooler, insulating one’s attic, visiting a dying relative, or searching for a cancer cure. The alternative to, say, rinsing out a jelly jar isn’t invariably such a high-value activity, of course, but we misallocate our time if we overestimate recycling’s value.

Education or Catechesis?

The “education” that the trash haulers provide is unlikely to be helpful in this regard. In the third curbside-recycling meeting Republic showed a video about a recycling curriculum it’s trying to have schools use on kids. It ended with a youngster being asked why he recycles. His answer? “To save the earth . . . and humanity.”

Such a messianic view of recycling brings to mind an epiphany that Prof. Munger experienced some years ago. He’d given a speech in which he laid out his argument that recycling glass almost never makes economic sense, and his audience had seemingly been so selected as not to find his views congenial. “Everyone,” he wrote, “represented either a municipal or provincial government, or a nonprofit recycling advocacy group, or a company that manufactured and sold complicated and expensive recycling equipment.” But instead of hostility the audience reaction was merely “polite applause, a few desultory questions.”

When he thereafter asked attendees about the lack of controversy,

One fellow was perfectly forthcoming: “Oh, we all know it makes no sense to recycle glass. The economic case is easy. But people should still recycle, because it’s simply the right thing to do. It’s not about the actual environment. It’s about enlisting people to care about the symbol of the environment. Overall, recycling is still worth doing, regardless of its effects.”

That led to Prof. Munger’s epiphany:

The message I had worried about, and expected to be controversial, was old hat to the industry folks. But it was beside the point, because recycling was for them a moral imperative. Once you begin to think of recycling as a symbol of religious devotion rather than a pragmatic solution to environmental problems, the whole thing makes more sense.

As in any religious ceremony, the whole point is sacrifice: Abraham was ready to slay Isaac; Catholics give up meat during Lent; Muslims fast all day during Ramadan. And a young woman in Chile with two two-liter bottles sits in her car in line, knowing she is publicly visible and that her green moral virtue is apparent to everyone.

Perhaps catechesis would be a better word than education for some of the efforts that advocates use to get people to recycle. Rather than a presentation of evidence, for example, the following statement made by Circular Indiana at the second curbside-recycling meeting sounded more like recitation of a creed:

Operating under circular-economy principles saves us money; it is more efficient; it takes less energy, it reduces the greenhouse gases that we emit. . . . When we minimize waste it provides a healthy environment. . . . We also know that circular-economy practices provide exponentially more jobs than land-filling. . . . Not only more jobs, but higher-skill-level jobs.

The proposition that waste disposal according to “circular-economy principles” can save us money even though providing it requires “exponentially more jobs” was stated merely as a matter of faith; no evidence was required.

Economic Development

The meeting at which Circular Indiana made that statement was held in order to portray the recycling program as spurring local economic development. Indeed, the Committee’s chairman opened the meeting as follows:

In this meeting we’re going to look at the economic-development benefits of recycling. That’s something that I think is critically important. And I also think that far too often anyone who might have concerns about our recycling program might think of it as something that’s virtuous but doesn’t bring any benefits, especially from an economic-development perspective. We in this room all know that that’s not true.

And the Office did orchestrate presentations that were intended to describe economic development in which expanded curbside recycling might result. In the event the presentations made by Recycle Force and Cummins had no apparent relevance to residential waste. But the one that Indy Chamber made did point out that if by expanding recycling Indianapolis provided recyclers a larger waste stream they’d have a greater incentive to set up shop in the Circle City and provide jobs.

In support of that proposition the meeting’s remaining presenters fell into two categories. The first consisted of Republic and WM: companies that haul residential waste and recover recyclable material from it. Expanded curbside recycling would make their operations more labor- and capital-intensive, requiring more recycle bins, drivers and trucks—and causing more wear on the residential streets those heavy trucks drive through. With expanded curbside recycling, that is, the same amount of waste disposal would require considerably more resources. Perhaps in an attempt to justify this productivity loss the second-category presenters testified to the cost savings that nearby users of the material recovered by the trash haulers would enjoy because more of their feedstock would come from shorter distances.

As the trash haulers emphasized, though, expanded curbside recycling will depend on household-recycling efforts. This implies that the time and other resources that residents spend on rinsing, sorting, and otherwise preparing recyclables for collection would need to increase. If the Hart requirement isn’t met, moreover, the proposed program would cost residents more in trash-collection fees. Corporate welfare like that in aid of companies such as the Mexican chemical conglomerate that owns the Richmond recycler is justified only if it provides enough environmental benefit.

How Much Environmental Benefit?

To get some sense of what that benefit’s value may actually be let’s consider the polyethylene terephthalate (“PET,” Recycle Code 1) bottles in which the Richmond recycler specializes. Assume for this purpose that a 16-fluid-ounce PET bottle weighs about 19 grams and that recycling under ideal conditions—i.e., when bottles have already been de-labeled, cleaned, and sorted—results in (1.7 × 19 g ≈) 32 g less carbon-dioxide emission than making the bottle from virgin plastic would.

As “Climate Scientists Make Us Skeptical” explained, there are good reasons for believing that carbon-dioxide emissions are actually a net benefit rather than a net cost. Even if we accept the Biden administration’s undoubtedly inflated $51-per-metric-ton figure for the “social cost” of emitting carbon dioxide, however, the value of recycling such a bottle comes to only (32 g ÷ 10⁶ g/t × $51/t ≈) $0.0016. And even if that Committee member’s removal of the label took only 5 seconds such effort would still yield only $1.18 worth of emissions-avoidance benefit per hour of labor. The plastics recycler didn’t mention that the return on the Committee member’s efforts would be so poor.

Or that it could be even worse. If the label is attached instead to a jelly jar, then washing the jar out would further add to the pre-processing time. And what about the cost of the (potentially hot) water? Then there’s the fact that in some homes carrying the jar to the recyclables container takes more time than just throwing it into the regular trash container; we know of one home where it takes an additional twenty seconds.

Note also that, depending on factors such as the distance to the curb, the recycling volume, whether gates and/or stairs are involved, and the value of the alternative activity, even just the time cost of taking the separate recycling bin to the curb and retrieving it can occasionally exceed the attendant emissions-avoidance value. So recycling can often take more time than it’s worth.

Indianapolis in the Aggregate

The current, optional curbside-recycling service provides another illustration of how people can overestimate recycling’s value. Although the presentation the Office gave at the first curbside-recycling meeting wasn’t a model of clarity, it seemed to say that the service’s average subscriber takes 20 to 30 pounds of recycling to the curb per month; let’s call it 300 pounds per year. The Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) contends that recycling a short ton of waste instead of burying it in a landfill avoids 2.83 metric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, i.e., 3.12 pounds of carbon dioxide per pound of waste. (Unlike the above-mentioned PET-specific ratio (1.7), the EPA’s calculation of this more-general ratio purportedly took into account the carbon-dioxide equivalent of the landfill methane emissions that recycling would avoid.) So the average subscriber annually avoids only (300 lbs. waste × 3.12 lbs. CO₂ / lb. waste ÷ 2205 lbs./t × $51/t ≈) $22 worth of emissions: much less than the $99 the homeowner pays for the service.

None of this is to deny that recycling efforts can be worthwhile in many everyday situations. In the aggregate, though, residential recycling will probably be a waste of time for Indianapolis households. Recall in this connection that recycling currently accounts for 5–6% of Indianapolis’s 287,000 tons of residential waste per year: around 15,800 tons annually. The Office’s estimate that making curbside recycling universal would increase the diversion rate from 7% to 12% implies a recycling-volume increase to only about 27,100 tons per year.

We say “only” because the resultant emissions-avoidance value would be a paltry (3.12 tn CO₂ / tn waste × 27,100 tn waste/year × 0.907 t/tn × $51/t CO₂ ÷ 52.2 weeks/year ÷ 360,000 households ≈) $0.21 per week per household. So residential recycling will in the aggregate be a waste of Indianapolis residents’ time unless the average household spends no more than 21¢ worth of its time per week on recycling. Twice that is less than the value of the time many residents lose every other week just in taking the separate recycling bin to and from the curb.

So there are probably better uses of classroom time than teaching kids what to put in recycle bins and how to pre-process it. If they’re to learn such things, though, they should also learn to make more-realistic assessments of when recycling efforts are worth it and when they’re not. They might learn, for instance, that even according to the Biden-administration numbers the emissions-avoidance value of doing ten pounds of recyclables preprocessing is only about 65¢—and that ten pounds translates to more than 200 of those 16-fluid-ounce PET bottles.

Or they might perform a spreadsheet exercise that’s similar to the one in “14,630,253 Metric Tons” but shows that even recycling all Indianapolis residential waste for the rest of the century would result in a temperature difference of only 0.00007°F and that this is only a fraction of the (10°F ÷ 12 hours ÷ 3600 seconds/hour × 1 sec ≈) 0.0002°F change that the Indianapolis temperature routinely undergoes in a single second:

Conclusion

We don’t profess to know whether universal curbside recycling will be better or worse than the current recycling scheme. But it’s likely to waste too much of residents’ time so long as they don’t receive better information upon which to base their individual recycling decisions.