Mandated recycling rates: Impacts on energy consumption and municipal solid waste volume

Two bills were introduced in the 102nd Congress that would have rewritten the nation`s comprehensive solid waste legislation--the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Commodity-specific recycling rates were proposed for consumer-goods packaging materials and newsprint. In this report, the authors compare the effects on energy use, materials use, and landfill volume of recycling at the mandated rates to the effects for alternative methods of material disposition to determine the optimum for each material. They also compare the alternative life-cycle energies to the energies required to produce the products from virgin materials. Results depend on the material and on the objective. Environmentally sound material disposition options considered include reuse, recycling to the same product, recycling to a lower-valued product, combustion for energy recovery, incineration without energy recovery, and landfill. Congress specifically excluded combustion for energy recovery from counting towards the recovery goals, probably because combustion is viewed as a form of disposal and is therefore assumed to waste resources and have negative environmental effects. However, co-combustion in coal-fired plants or combustion in appropriately pollution-controlled waste-to-energy plants is safe, avoids landfill costs, and can displace fossil fuels--in some cases, more fossil fuels than by recycling. Therefore, the objectives of the proposed legislation mustmore » be examined to see if they can most effectively be achieved by recycling at the mandated rates or by other methods of disposition.« less