The alchemy of recycling still produces no gold.

H/T Recycling: another idea that isn’t going quite as planned by Neo

The virtue is so compelling that we are still pursuing a public policy which has never worked - Recycling. It has had its economic ups and downs but the fundamentals are that it significantly cheaper to throw trash away than it is to recycle. And this has been true for the entire life cycle of this fad. China's boom and hunger for paper and metals made it an almost breakeven proposition for a decade or two but even that market has dried up with their slowing economy and rising costs.

A major reveal was during the Great Recession when many municipalities and counties ditched their recycling programs. Since they were not covering costs, they were a luxury the municipalities could no longer afford to subsidize.

In 1996 John Tierney blew the whistle. Recycling Is Garbage by John Tierney.

He blew it again nearly two decades later in 2015. The Reign of Recycling by John Tierney 2015.

Now, the Atlantic and Reason are both doing the same. Is This the End of Recycling? by Alana Semuels and Some Towns Are Trashing Their Costly, Inefficient Recycling Programs by Eric Boehm.

We all of us would wish that there was no trash or that what is waste for us could be turned into alchemical gold. It is not so and never has been so. The Atlantic article has a few turns of phrase that belie that this particular fad is about environmental virtue. It is about ideological commitment.

The best way to fix recycling is probably persuading people to buy less stuff, which would also have the benefit of reducing some of the upstream waste created when products are made. But that’s a hard sell in the United States, where consumer spending accounts for 68 percent of the GDP. The strong economy means more people have more spending money, too, and often the things they buy, such as new phones, and the places they shop, such as Amazon, are designed to sell them even more things. The average American spent 7 percent more on food and 8 percent more on personal-care products and services in 2017 than in 2016, according to government data.

That is the ultimate boulder in the statist path to power. What they really want is fewer people and they want those people to buy less and live more simply. Welcome to the mind of Pol Pot.

Of course, we have other such programs - things we really want to be true and which would be wonderful if they were true but which, so far, we can find no evidence are true.

Recycling is a leading example of this policy-by-wish approach, but so are pre-school for the disadvantaged to give them a better start in life and cost competitive alternate energy and renewable energy. We want these things to be true and it would be nice if they were.

But they simply aren't. Every rigorous study so far indicates otherwise.

UPDATE: And now the New York Times is sounding the warning again. As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling by Michael Corkery