By D. L. Norris
The secret is out, there is no money in recycling. The global market for recyclable material has collapsed and now, instead of Okaloosa County profiting by being paid for their recyclables, they have to pay others to haul their recyclables away. I’m not an economist, but I do have a basic understanding of supply and demand. If there is no global market for recyclables, then there is no value to the recyclable material. If material has no value, then it is defined as “trash”. If Okaloosa County has to pay a company to haul off their “recyclables”, those recyclables are effectively “trash”; thus, recyclables = trash. The agent Okaloosa County pays to haul off the “trash” will have to find the cheapest way to dispose of the “trash” in order to maximize their profits. Those options will likely be landfill or incineration since they will have difficulty selling it, due to the fact that there is no global market for the “trash”. Once Okaloosa County hands the “trash” over to the contracted agent, what happens to the “trash” is out of their hands and no longer their problem.
On October 15, 2019, the Okaloosa County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), once again showed their progressive leanings when they voted unanimously, 5-0, to continue contracting with Emerald Coast Utilities Authority (ECUA) to accept Okaloosa County’s recyclable material at a cost to Okaloosa County of $41/ton through September 2021. The funds to cover this increase in cost are coming from the county Solid Waste Enterprise Fund. No reserves will be spent and there will be no increase to the customers in their monthly billing. The commissioners passed this off as a feel-good decision with no increase in cost to the county residents but that is misleading. All government funding comes from the taxpayers. There was an increase in cost to this contract and, the fact that the increased cost is being covered by the Solid Waste Enterprise Fund, is still at the taxpayers’ expense. If there is no global market for recyclable material, then the ECUA must have the same problem that every other entity in the recyclables commodities market has, no buyer for the commodity. Therefore, even ECUA will likely have to send some to a landfill. If reality points to the recyclable material having zero value thus redefining it as trash, Okaloosa County should have canceled their contract with ECUA and just kept their contract with Waste Management for all solid waste disposal to include trash formerly known as recyclable material. So why couldn’t the BOCC be the adults in the room, and make an economic decision to keep the taxpayers’ expense as low as possible? My answer to that question is progressive creep.
Bre Payton, in the Federalist article, Why Recycling is a Waste of Time, June 25, 2015, goes into great details of how the act of “Recycling” is intended to make people into scavengers under the pretense of being salvagers. Said Payton, “Pushing the masses to participate in recycling on a large-scale is training them to over value worthless trash. Progressive lawmakers have been pushing citizens into a deranged fantasy, and using taxpayer dollars to do it.” Promoting the fantasy of large scale recycling is only part of the problem, the bigger issue is that the technology to recycle most materials just doesn’t exist and, that which does, usually cost more for the manufacturer. Alana Samuels, in the Atlantic article, Is this the End of Recycling?, March 5, 2019, says it best, “For now, it is still often cheaper for companies to manufacture using new materials than recycled ones…Items made of different types of plastics nearly always end up in the trash, because the recyclers can’t separate the plastics from one another.”
So, is it fair to blame the BOCC for caving in to a small percentage of citizens’ emotional need to recycle when the reality is that large scale recycling is a scam and the recyclable material may end up in a land fill anyway? My answer to that questions is “Yes”. I voted for my District 4 Commissioner, Trey Goodwin III, because he ran as a conservative republican. There is nothing conservative about spending more money to keep a dead program on life support with little hope of resuscitation, because it makes a few misinformed, or miseducated, citizens feel good.
How much are you willing to pay to be able to say we are recycling in Okaloosa County? How many households would you be willing to subsidize, out of your pocket, not county taxes, to say we are recycling? If it all ends up in the same dump, is it really recycling? Be thinking about the answers to those questions because, by September 2021, this current Okaloosa County contract with ECUA will end and then another decision will have to be made. Will the BOCC make the fiscally conservative choice or another liberal progressive one? An election in 2020 may impact the answer. Stay tuned for the results.
You can contact the author at dlnorris@theparadisepatriot.com