Austin’s recycling program is an abuse of government power

This commentary originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on January 11, 2016.

Should Austin — or local government in general — mandate recycling as a moral good? And if it does, should they be subject to a standard to ensure that the recycling program is effective, rather than just well-intentioned?

How individuals answer the first question depends on whether or not they consider environmentalism to be a moral issue. How they answer the second question though, should not be.

The first question — the “morality question” — represents a difference in worldview between conservatives and liberals, and explains why there have been such starkly different reactions to the recent news that the city’s allegedly profitable recycling program has actually cost taxpayers approximately $2.7 million over the last two years.

Originally, Austin’s recycling program was billed as a money-making venture — estimated to secure $500,000 a year from resold recyclables. But, the American-Statesman reports, the recycling program is in fact a financial burden. The importance placed on this budgetary strain, however, differs based on the practice’s perceived moral value, as Council Members Don Zimmerman and Leslie Pool demonstrate.

Zimmerman says he’d like to see a retreat from the city’s zero-waste goal. Unless Austin is making money out of it, he says, the city “should be out of the waste business entirely.”

Pool, who chairs the council’s Open Space, Environment and Sustainability Committee, said, “as stewards of the environment, it’s not always about making money.”

Zimmerman represents the viewpoint that, in a world of scarce resources, opportunity costs, and a need for limited government, recycling is not a sufficient “moral good” so as to justify an expensive, government-mandated, tax-supported program. Pool, meanwhile, represents the opposite perspective, seeing recycling as a moral issue — although presumably there is a point, somewhere above $2.7 million, at which even she would say the scarcity of resources outweigh the cost of an environmental recycling program.

Yet, irrespective of the “morality” question, council members and Austinites on both ends of the spectrum can agree in their response to the second question: If government mandates recycling, they should be expected to comply with a standard of effectiveness.

Even if recycling is “not always about making money,” the moral aspect used to justify government intervention is only sufficient if the relevant government program meets certain standards of effectiveness.

Both liberals and conservatives generally agree, for example, that the government is justified in collecting taxes to provide fire-protection services. Nonetheless, both sides would likely also agree that the government is not justified in collecting taxes if they used them to hire untrained firefighters who rely on water guns rather than hoses. The same principle is true in the case of government-mandated environmental services. Even if intervention is justified, government should not take advantage of its monopoly on services by forcing taxpayers to pay for expensive, ineffective programs.

Yet, Austin’s recycling service appears to be one such monopoly-abusing program. Under the existing recycling system, the city pays more than $1 million a year for a service in which not even the head of Austin Resource Recovery knows “whether all the recyclable materials in the blue carts actually end up getting recycled.” Furthermore, even the transportation method used to carry out the system — requiring large, gas-guzzling trucks to service the city twice weekly, before driving the recyclables all over the Lone Star State to be repurposed—has an undeniable effect on the environment that raises additional questions about the true net “footprint” of the program.

Thus, although Austin’s revelation about the results of its recycling service has triggered different reactions with respect to profitability, both sides should share in a righteous indignation regarding the city’s abuse of its monopoly. If the city of Austin is going to force taxpayers to pay for environment-related services out of a sense of civic morality, they have a duty to ensure that those services are efficient and effective, rather than just well-intentioned.

Hill is an analyst with the Center for Local Governance at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. She can be reached at [email protected].