The Hartford Business Journal encourages me to recycle. No, no the paper isn’t a champion of the Green Revolution; I don’t get stern memos from Human Resources directing me to put all my newsroom beer cans in the appropriate trash bin.
I am encouraged to recycle old column ideas. The publisher pays me the same $5 a week, whether I’m breaking new ground in areas of public policy, philosophy and theology — or whether I’m cranking out the same old stuff I sneaked in a few months ago.
I can always write another column decrying the mandated introduction of low-flow toilets, which environmentalists prefer because they don’t actually work. I can always recycle one of those old pieces about HOV lanes — the “high occupancy vehicle” highway lanes that are available only to folks who bring a buddy or two or three to work — which means that the wasteful strips of asphalt sit empty most of the day and most of the night.
Readers enjoy those subjects — and as long as the newspaper checks don’t bounce, it’s a lot easier to recycle than to invent yet another piece of pioneering, brilliant work.
Economists understand what I’m about. Economists worship the notion of incentives — and Cohen the Columnist is responding to an incentive to recycle. The guitar-strumming environmentalists have to get on that band wagon. Theoretical abstractions about the world caving in when the last 100 years of National Geographic from everyone’s basement is dumped in the landfill is, well, too theoretical.
Various purveyors, sorters, haulers, processors and philosophers of trash in Connecticut are bemoaning the reality that the state does not seem atwitter over sorting our bottles and cans and newspapers from other household trash and nuclear fuel rods. Our recycling rate remains at about 25 percent, despite the fact that most copies of Cohen’s columns get put on refrigerator doors, thus reducing the trash stream of extraordinary commentary.
How can we arouse the neighbors to reduce the landfill avalanche and send the recyclables to a mysterious place where they will emerge, reborn, as the plastic coating on low-flow toilets? (Remind me to tell you some time about low-flow toilets.)
The answer, of course, is incentives. Make it worth our while to reduce the number of empty pizza boxes that are going to the dump, instead of to the recycling facility. What we need is a little different kind of incentive to make this work. While Cohen can be prodded to recycle old columns by paying him, the garbage thing is best done by making us all pay for our garbage, by volume or pound or something like that. The incentive is to produce less garbage — and thus reduce our garbage bill.
The instinct is frightening, of course. The city that is most aggressive and effective at the pay-for-garbage recycling experiment is San Francisco, home to virtually every goof-ball idea that has ever occurred to odd folksingers. But, this particular idea makes sense. Liberals and conservatives and Libertarians can come together in a messy group hug and marvel at a garbage experiment that combines the notions of private property (it’s your garbage), market efficiency, and an end result that presumably enhances the Public Good.
The “pay as you throw” movement is catching on, in large part because we have better things to bicker about. As University of Hartford economist Jeff Cohen (he only wishes he was my son) suggested to me, pay-as-you-throw “aligns with the conservative tenants of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, free markets, and fairness.”
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
