I was
looking through some old writing of mine, as you do, and I found this little
scribbling I wrote in 1998:
The recent hysteria-driven campaign
to recycle more and more paper on the grounds that it's a virtuous tree-saving
exercise is to me pretty evidently going to turn out to be not just incorrect,
but the precise opposite of the truth. The proposition fails in its logic,
which means in all likelihood future evidence will show it to be mistaken.
Here's why. Most wood used for the
purpose of producing paper comes from trees planted and grown for the purpose
of producing paper, in exactly the same way that farm animals are bred for the
purpose of meat consumption. If you recycle paper in mass quantities you lower
the need for as much tree-planting, which amounts to shifting the demand curve
down and making price and quantity fall. This means that tree-planting and the
land used for tree planting no longer hold the same value for wood production.
The number of trees will diminish as a result of mass recycling, just as the
number of farm animals bred will decrease if lots of people suddenly become vegetarians.
Almost everybody can get the logic
when you talk about animals and vegetarians, yet so few people get it when you
talk about trees and paper. Presumably this is because many people support
recycling because it gives them an ethical buzz of virtuousness, and when
people have that buzz it often makes them myopic towards the efficacy of the
policy.
Seventeen
years later, and with it now being evidential that paper recycling means fewer
trees, the above seems quite prescient. It's always good to remind the people
who claim to care about preservation of trees that
if they really cared they should be against paper recycling, not for it. Understanding
how prices work helps you understand that paper is cheap and that recycling is
worse for trees and for consumption. Many trees are farmed for economic reasons
- for making wood pulp for paper production - and
in commercial terms they are planted for future sales, and plentifully so, which is why the logic is fairly easily translated into evidence.
