Feature Article,June 24, 2004
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Full-Cost Accounting for GarbageFull-cost accounting means that we add up ALL the costs related to the process. For garbage, it is a long list and many who discuss garbage do not think about the whole long list.
There are two basic types of costs of garbage. Dollar costs and resource costs. Garbage costs us resources because we throw away things that contain resources that are still useful and then we must obtain more new resources to replace the resources lost in the garbage. Wasted resources and their replacement both have dollar costs that can be calculated.
But garbage costs us dollars in many other ways. On a personal level, we buy all the garbage that we throw out. Then we buy fuel for the car take it to the dump. We buy bag tags to let us add the garbage to the dump but that does not cover all the costs. So we pay some more dollars in taxes to pay for dump attendants, fences, gates, compactors, covering fill, council meetings etc. Because many dumps have contaminated streams, groundwater and wells, we now also must pay for engineering studies of what is coming out of the garbage in the dump and getting into the air and the water. When the dump does contaminate the water or air or when the dump gets too full, regulations force us to spend even more dollars than the usual costs of running the dump sometimes a lot more.
Municipalities try to reduce these costs of garbage. Reducing the amount of garbage flowing into the dump is fundamental to reducing costs. If taxpayers do not remove organic waste, such as food wastes and garden clippings, and compost or bury them, then these organic wastes increase the garbage flowing into the dump by 30% to 50%. If the organic wastes are removed, up to 30% of the remaining garbage still does not need to go into the dump. It can be recycled to recover the useful resources in it.
What can be recycled depends on the markets that will buy and process the waste. Even with moderately good markets for the recyclables, municipalities often must pay to have the waste recycled up to half its market value. Its not just about the value of the resources that can be recovered from recycling. Its also about the costs of getting those resources back into the raw material stream of the industrial producer. The actual resource savings from some types of recycling are so low that costs of getting the garbage back into the industrial stream cannot be recovered. For example, recycled glass has to be transported to wherever the glass factory is located. To reduce the fuel costs of transporting it, the glass may be crushed into cuttle but the resource costs of preparing and transporting the glass are great. The resources to be saved by recycling glass are the resources going into making it -- sand and electricity. Both are questionable when compared to the costs of gathering, preparing and transporting the glass. Clearly, refilling the bottles locally would save a lot more resources.
However, the cost accounting for recycling has been shifted from saving resources to avoiding some of the costs of running and of closing dumps. Municipalities do not want bottles in the dump because they will fill the dump too quickly and bring on the high costs of closing the dump to meet provincial regulations. Municipalities want recycling so badly that some are selling the material to be recycled to foreign groups who extract only a small, valuable portion of the resources and dump the remainder in their country. Recycling has drifted from its original objective.
The real solution is for taxpayers and municipalities to stop denying that there is a problem about garbage. There is a severe problem and it is increasing. The number of people is increasing and the amount of garbage produced by each one also is increasing. It is increasing because of increasing, thoughtless consumerism promoted by all the advertisers and because changes in marketing have cause gigantic increases in packaging waste.
Most of these factors can be controlled to some degree, often a large degree, by individual tax payers. You better do so or you will be paying heavily -- both in lost resources and in lost dollars.
