By the Sea, By the Sea,
By the Not So Beautiful Salton Sea

by Greg Breining

 

Greg Breining is a free-lance writer who lives in St. Paul. His opinions are NOT those of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

I work part-time as the managing editor of a magazine published by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Recently, in trying to staunch the flow of money from our operating budget, we re-examined our paper costs: $270,000 a year for a high-quality coated web stock. The amount wasn't surprising; nor was the fact that it is our single greatest expense. The same is true for most high-circulation periodicals. What did surprise me is that we spend an extra $22,000 a year because we used recycled paper.

State bureaucracy being what it is, I asked someone at our Department of Administration if we could switch to a "virgin" paper of comparable weight, quality and whiteness. Absolutely not, he said. It's against the law. Minnesota requires state agencies to use paper with 10 percent post-consumer waste, whenever practical. And practicality has nothing to do with cost.

Furthermore, he said, is the Department of Natural Resources, the state's major environmental agency, ready to announce that its magazine, which "advocates conservation and wise use of the state's natural resources," no longer uses recycled paper? He didn't think so.

Still, $22,000 is a lot of money. State law notwithstanding, it seemed irresponsible not to ask: How much environmental good are we buying for $22,000 a year. How many trees do we save by using recycled paper?

As I soon discovered, not very much, and not very many.

I first called our printer, who explained it isn't feasible for us to use paper made of 100 percent recycled fiber. High-circulation magazines are printed on "web" stock. (Imagine a huge spinning roll of toilet paper.) Recycling leaves fibers so short and weak that the paper would continually break in a high-speed press. To maintain strength, our so-called recycled paper consists of only 10 percent recycled fiber.

If the recycled content is so little, I asked the supervisor at the company that makes our paper, why does it cost so much? The reason, he said is the high cost of sorting recycled paper, and de-inking and bleaching the recycled pulp. (Ink sludge and other waste wind up in a landfill.)

So, how many trees do we save by using recycled? I asked. Here are the numbers:

Our yearly paper use, about 120 tons, consisted of about 40 tons of coating and 80 tons of total fiber, he said. That amount of fiber would require about 160 cords of wood, mostly young aspen with some maple, beech, ash and other hardwoods. Our 10 percent post-consumer waste content replaced or "saved" about 16 cords of pulpwood.

Sixteen cords. In other words, 16 stacks measuring 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet. That, according to a DNR forester, can be clear-cut from a single acre of aspen forest in central or northern Minnesota. A DNR economist told me that the average price paid for aspen pulpwood stumpage sold in competitive bids by public land agencies in Minnesota in 1996 was $16 a cord. Other hardwoods were less. Our 16 cords "saved" would cost about $250 if purchased as standing trees.

In other words, spending $22,000 saved $250 worth of wood, cut from land worth about $400 an acre. What's wrong with this picture?

I posed these numbers to several colleagues who report on environmental issues. Some objected strenuously that the market value of land and timber do not account for the full range of environmental values. Forest land performs unaccounted-for "services," such as controlling erosion, slowing and filtering runoff, and providing wildlife habitat.

Okay, let's try to pin a value to some of these benefits and add them to the total value of the standing trees.

Through recycling, we avoid land-filling or incinerating about eight tons of fiber (though we still dispose of a large amount of coating and ink). How much is this worth? My trash hauler tells me it can dispose of organic yet largely unrecyclable garbage for $38 a ton. Our avoided costs in this case total a whopping $300.

Some "benefits" to keeping a crop of aspen on the land are downright ambiguous. By clear-cutting aspen, we may reduce the land's value as habitat for some wildlife species; for others, such as deer, moose, ruffed grouse, and even gray wolves, logging may be an improvement. What about other ecological services? In some areas, runoff will increase significantly; in others, especially in pancake-flat northern Minnesota, it will not.

Other benefits are clear but slight. By harvesting trees and ultimately incinerating paper we release sequestered carbon, which may contribute to global warming. By logging, we remove some nutrients from the site. We also lose aesthetic value; indeed, in tourism-dependent northern Minnesota, that may be the greatest loss of all. All of these things account for something, but their value is not infinite. We are, after all, talking about a single acre. I doubt that by any accounting the value of these benefits totals anything near $22,000.

Let's look at this another way. Our decision to spend the extra money on recycled paper is a decision to allocate resources that otherwise could be used to: * Buy 55 acres of aspen forest EVERY YEAR and protect it forever. Or, if you prefer, buy 100 acres of wetland, 20 acres of high-quality farm land, or several acres of old-growth white pines to add to a park, wildlife management area or Nature Conservancy preserve -- every year. * Hire a biologist half-time to work on a nongame program. * Buy a new pickup truck or other equipment for a worthy research or management project.

Any number of ways you might spend $22,000 could benefit the environment far more than buying recycled magazine paper. In fact, it is hard to imagine spending money any more foolishly. Who would spend $22,000 of his own money to protect $400 worth of land, save $300 in trash-hauling costs, and produce some rather had-to-define environmental benefits? No one would. Yet that is exactly what our public Buy Recycled laws force us to do.

There is a simple and appealing symmetry in insisting that paper be recycled to paper. But in many cases we are simply working long and hard to make a silk purse of a sow's ear. Economics would suggest that some papers (such as high-quality white paper for books and magazines) might be better made of virgin materials, and that recycled fiber is more efficiently used in paper towels and newsprint. And why insist that paper beget paper? Maybe we're better off using fiber in kitty litter, fertilizer and Beanie Baby stuffing.

I still sort bottles from cans and drag my used office trash and newspapers to the curb every other Thursday. But I can't support recycling for recycling's sake. By adopting the mantra that all recycling is good for the earth and then ignoring its cost, society misallocates time, money and effort. The public and the environment both would gain if government would take the money now spent on the futile alchemy of turning trash into high-quality paper and invest it instead in parks, forests and other wild lands managed for the public good.

 

Previous "Works In Progress" columns:

Archived on 2/18/98 -- By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Not So Beautiful Salton Sea, by Harvey Black
Archived on 1/16/98 -- Fast Finish for Dark Horse (Photovoltaics), by David Tenenbaum
Archived on 10/06/97 -- Floating Classrooms, by Amy Nevala
Archived on 9/22/97 -- His Own Private Wisconsin, by Harvey Black
Archived on 9/08/97 -- The Green Map System, by Wendy Brawer
Archived on 7/14/97 -- Wildlife Cops and Robbers, by Eric Craypo
Archived on 6/30/97 -- Oberlin College Environmental Studies Center, by William McDonough + Partners
Archived on 6/09/97 -- Ecological Art, by Katherine Kormendi
Archived on 5/27/97 -- The Schuylkill Maid, by J. Baldwin