Why John Tierney is a Douchebag

This is so important it deserves its own section. Who is John Tierney, you ask? Only, unfortunately, the person most often cited by the anti-recyclers because of the article he wrote in the New York Times. This article, "Recycling is Garbage" was written in 1996, and these people have been quoting it since then.

The article is here if you can stomach it. John Tierney is, unfortunately, a good and compelling writer, and good writers can make bad points look good. Never fear though - some dedicated people took apart his arguments piece by piece. Their relatively well known rebuttal can be found here. This is a lot more technical, unfortunately, so will probably not be able to reach as large an audience. After all, there's no happy story about schoolchildren at the beginning.

So, in case you don't feel like reading the articles (they're long), here's some of the things wrong with his article. Some are from the rebuttal article, some are my own. (currently in progress)

•The annoying little anecdote at the beginning, telling the story of a class of kindergardeners who wasted more resources (bags and gloves) picking up litter they found around school than any sort of recycling they found in that litter. He then tries to apply this situation to the world at large, as if they were comparable
•Tierney concludes that because the "garbage crisis" of the 1980s was a false alarm, there is "no shortage of landfill space." This drastically ignores the future, and makes it sound as though it's only about landfill space. It's also the pollution produced from the landfills themselves, and produced making new products from virgin materials. When the anti-recyclers try to argue that throwing stuff away is more efficient they will either complain that recycling has a cost (so does garbage), or they will compare the process of taking garbage to landfills to the process of recycling, without taking into account the processing of new materials from virgin materials. This is how so many of the anti-recyclers come up with the statement that throwing stuff away is more efficient.
•This article tends to ignore how recycling costs change with area. In more concentrated areas, (ie New England) there is a lot less landfill space and recycling is much more beneficial there. Also, the more people that participate the more efficient it is, because more materials are collected per round of collecting. When first setting up recycling, it is hard to get people to do it, because that requires them to change. This changes over time.
•I have a hard time believing that a McDonald's meal generates less trash than a home-cooked meal. This is totally subjective, because it depends what you cook anyway. If we take the example of say, on bag of spaghetti (small!) for a family of four compared to a burger wrapper, drink container, fries wrapper, ketchup packets per each person, I don't see how McDonald's generates less trash. Also, are we considering health considerations here, and the impact of eating unhealthily, which would technically drive up costs?
•Tierney mentions that paper products - supposedly more biodegradable than plastic - do not biodegrade in a tight, airless landfill, and that the paper products accounted for more space. This is a moot point because if we recycled those paper products, it wouldn't matter so much how they biodegrade in landfills (until the unusable pulp is disposed of.)•Tierney says that newspapers and magazines etc. are forced to employ agreements adding recycled content to their newspapers when in fact many of these agreements are voluntary. Also, according to some sites, as printed in the rebuttal, recycled newsprint costs less than virgin newsprint, so it's cost effective
•This is a "big deal" article, and he totally never sites his sources. "Studies have found [...]" He does this a lot
•Improved landfills do not mean that hazardous waste is gone. He says that the poisons stay "trapped" but this is ignoring air pollution, even if leachate didn't leak out even with precautions, which it does. Also, leachate, with costs money to be treated, is at least treated; the air pollution is not
•He tries to say that shipping garbage out of New York -which has run out of landfill space - is a good thing - what?
•He mentions this statistic (that I actually saw in the Opposing Viewpoints book) about fitting all our garbage into one relatively small area, comparing it to the size of the United States. This is ridiculously impractical, and makes it sound as though recycling is only based on space reasons. Recycling also contributes to reducing pollution, and not creating more environmental damage by harvesting raw virgin materials
•About land lost to landfills, he says the "loss will only be temporary," and can soon be used as grassland. However, later he talks of the stupidity of putting a school right on top of a landfill. This land does not become useful space.
•He mentions that more trees are being planted than are being cut down, but doesn't mention that the trees being cut down are not paper tree farms, but natural forests, thereby destroying habitats. Also, the trees being planted are the same few species. Um, biodiversity much? One of the anti-recycling articles says that recycling does nothing about preserving biodiversity. I was going to agree, but now I retract that statement
•Tierney mentions "oil shortages of the 1970s" and "but the oil scare was temporary, just like all previous scares about natural resources." Um haha, this scare has resurfaced. Also, what's up with this idea of waiting until we have absolutely no gas left until we do something about it?
•He has this idea of "cheap means abundant" which the rebuttal article pointed out was probably the hugest fallacy of his whole article. "Cheap" is more a function of how easy they are to produce, and that we haven't run out of them yet, not that we won't ever. Also, sometimes it's cheap because the companies haven't been following environmental protections when making products.
•At the end he tries to say that making citizens recycle at home is "forced labor." Right, because putting things in a trash can and putting it out to the street is also "forced labor." Except he doesn't mention that. My family recycles everything we can and it takes a negligible amount of "extra time." And now he's trying to add a "what if" labor cost of the homeowner. he cites that it only took some random student 8 minutes a week to recycle, but makes up some numbers and come up with a dollar amount we should "give" homeowners.
•Tierney uses the isolated example of New York City, saying that it is more expensive than landfills to recycle there, and uses this example to apply to all places.