Denver’s curbside recycling program is proving that helping the environment can also help the taxpayers.
The burden of constantly replacing packaging, newspapers, beverage cans and other refuse with virgin material obviously adds to the strain on the environment.
An extreme example is the aluminum can, which requires 20 times as much energy to create new from bauxite than to melt an existing can to form a new one.
The environmental benefits of recycling are so obvious that we’d be willing to subsidize the process if that were necessary.
But, as Jeremy P. Meyer’s story in Monday’s Denver Post detailed, it turns out that recycling is actually cheaper than mindlessly dumping trash into landfills.
Charlotte Pitt, the city’s recycling program manager, notes, “We here at solid- waste management pick up trash whether a resident puts it in a garbage can or a recycling container. It costs us about $50 a ton to move it from the curb to the landfill when we pick it up in a trash can. In a recycling container, the net cost is about $25 a ton. The savings include the fuel we save not running trucks to the landfill, the fees we don’t pay [including $14-a-ton landfill fee] and the money we get from the materials.”
In short, while the city doesn’t technically turn a profit on recycling, it doesn’t have the option of letting trash pile up in alleys, either. So doing the right thing environmentally ends up saving about half the cost of traditional waste disposal.
Offsetting those savings is the $2 million Denver paid to provide new carts to more than 62,000 residents to replace the open bins that were used previously. The city also spent another $2 million for 10 new trucks to handle the carts, but that’s not entirely an additional cost for recycling since the old vehicles were due for replacement anyway.
If Denver meets its target of recycling 24,000 tons of trash next year at a savings of $25 a ton, savings (in the form of cost reductions) will total $600,000 – enough to amortize the cost of the new bins in three to four years, equivalent to about a 25 percent annual return on the original investment.
Even adding in the costs of the trucks would leave a 12 percent annual return on investment – pretty good for government work.
So Denver’s citizens and leaders can take a bow for proving that good environmental citizenship also turns out to be a wise use of tax dollars.
