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In recent years, numerous groups (including agencies of the federal government) have offered unsolicited advice on how Americans can be a "good environmentalists." Advice on what products are environmentally "good" and "bad" is routinely given to consumers, to legislators and even to children through TV and school materials. All too often the advice reflects the reactionary environmentalists' theological dislike of man-made things rather than a true concern for the environment. As a result, this advice often ages environmentally destructive behavior.
Case Study: The Attack on Disposables. To reactionary environmentalists, anything "disposable" is bad and "recycling" is always good. Yet progressive environmentalists know that recycling itself has environmental side effects. Curbside garbage recycling programs usually require more collection trucks – one set for recyclables, the other for the remaining waste – which means more fuel consumption and more air pollution. Some recycling programs produce high volumes of water waste and use large amounts of energy. Cradle-to-grave studies (which look at all of the environmental impacts of a product's production and consumption) show what sensible people should have guessed anyway: sometimes recycling makes sense and sometimes it doesn't. [210]
One area where recycling seems to make sense is in the disposal of aluminum cans. Since recycling requires 10 percent less energy than transforming bauxite into aluminum, it pays for producers to use recycled cans and a market for these cans encourages entrepreneurs to find efficient ways to collect them. [211]
One area where recycling doesn't make sense is juice containers for school children. Aseptic (disposable) packages – little juice boxes – have been banned in Maine, and they are a frequent target of reactionary environmentalists. Yet consider that: [212]
Filling aseptic boxes requires about half as much energy as filling glass bottles.
For a given beverage volume, transporting empty glass bottles requires 15 times as many trucks as empty aseptic boxes – thus using more fuel and causing more air pollution.
Because the end product is lightweight, small and rectangular, filled aseptic packages can be transported more efficiently than full glass bottles – using 35 percent less energy.
And since aseptic boxes are the only containers which do not require refrigeration, they do not contribute to CFC production (said to pose a threat to the ozone layer) by conventional refrigerants.
Another area where the attack on disposables can lead to environmentally destructive behavior is the use of disposable diapers – which a number of states are threatening to ban. Cradle-to-grave studies show that when all environmental effects are considered, cloth diapers have no clear advantage over disposable diapers. [213] Moreover, in certain areas of the country, the case for disposables is exceptionally strong. In California and other western states, there is relatively abundant landfill space (but for the normal political obstacles) and a shortage of water. California residents who avoid disposables and wash cloth diapers with scarce water may think they are being good environmental citizens. But they may be actually causing environmental harm. [214]
Case Study: The Attack on Non-biodegradable Products. In the theology of reactionary environmentalism, anything that degrades (nature's recycling) is "good," anything that doesn't is "bad." The facts say otherwise. Modern landfills (about one-third of all landfills) are completely sealed, thus -preventing biodegradation of anything. In the landfills that are not sealed, the items that don't degrade (such as plastic) cause no harm. The real threat to humans and the environment comes from the products that do degrade. Degradation can lead to leaching as chemicals reach our water supply and cause a health threat to fish, wildlife and humans.
Several cities, including Portland, Oregon and Newark, New Jersey, have essentially banned polystyrene food packages – used, for example, to hold McDonald's hamburgers – and reactionary environmentalists recently bullied McDonald's into switching from polystyrene to paperboard containers. Yet studies show that: [215]
Production of the polystyrene hamburger shell uses 30 percent less energy than paperboard.
Its manufacture results in 46 percent less air pollution and 42 percent less water pollution.
Many of the same issues apply to the reactionary attack on polystyrene cups. For example: [216]
The average 10-gram paper cup consumes 33 grams of wood and uses 28 percent more petroleum in its manufacture than the entire input in a polystyrene cup.
The paper cup requires 36 times as much chemical input as the polystyrene cup, partly because it weighs seven times as much.
It takes about 12 times as much steam, 36 times as much electricity and twice as much cooling water to make the paper cup.
About 580 times as much waste water, 10 to 100 times the residual effluents of pollutants and three times the air emission Pollutantsare produced in making the paper cup.
In addition to all that, paper cups cost the consumer about two-and-one-half times as much as polystyrene cups. And polystyrene is completely recyclable, which isn't always true of the paper used in cups.
Another area on which the reactionaries have set their sights is product packaging. In general, they advise that packaging is bad and products without a package are environmentally preferable. But is this always true? Packaging conserves resources by reducing breakage and spoilage. Precisely because of state-of-the-art packaging, the United States wastes less food than any part of the world except Africa, where the threat of starvation means that even rotten food is consumed. [217] Because of packaging, we can meet our consumption needs while producing less food – which means fewer pesticides, less pollution and less energy use. This general principle applies to other products as well.
