Why recycle if there’s a cost to recycling?

We do - no, really, we do - grasp the point of recycling. As we never tire of pointing out one of us once made a house’s worth of money recycling bits of old Soviet nuclear power station into gofaster wheels for the cars of boy racers. Lovely stuff, recycling. But the point of recycling is to make money. To take a resource and reuse it that is. To add value to society by not throwing away something of value but conserving - reusing - that value. Making a profit that is, moving something from a lower to higher valued use, from rubbish to something.

If we lose money on the adventure then we are not saving resources. For prices are a measure of the resources being used to do something. If the money result is negative then we’re using more resources to do that thing than having done the thing is worth - we’re making a loss, wasting resources:

Vape sellers will have to pay for the disposal of the devices under plans announced by the government.

Ministers said they would “end the UK’s throwaway culture” as they revealed measures to fund the recycling of electrical waste.

Online vendors of electrical goods including microwaves and computers will have to contribute to the cost of recycling them at the end of their life, under a “polluter pays principle”.

That the hunt is on for someone to pay for this recycling proves that this recycling is not profitable. That it, in fact, wastes resoures not saves them. So, why are we bothering to waste resources in this manner?

Tim Worstall