The Great Washington County Recycling Scandal of 2012 began innocently enough. Faced with rising costs for its recycling program, the county’s commissioners voted to charge users a $3 monthly fee. The fee revenue, combined with subsidies from the county’s solid waste project, would be enough to cover the program’s cost. And, the commissioners reasoned, it makes good sense that a county service would be funded (partly) by the people who use it.[1]

Good sense, perhaps, but not good politics—the commissioners soon felt the backlash of angry recyclers. And those criticisms didn’t just come from local residents; Baltimore Sun writer Dan Rodricks devoted a column to lecturing the rubes in Maryland’s hinterlands that “recycling is the right thing to do,” and that only “only the resentful, the slothful and people who want to abolish the Federal Reserve … feel otherwise.”[2]

I’m ambivalent about the Fed, but I don’t want to abolish it. So I must be resentful or slothful because I’m convinced that recycling isn’t the right thing to do—at least, not in all cases. In observance of Earth Day, I hope to convince you of that, too.

When it comes to trash, I submit that “the right thing to do” is to not waste valuable resources and to limit harm to the environment. In philosophical terms, recycling is an “instrumental good” that is worthwhile because it helps to achieve something that is good in its own right—in this case, abundant life sustained by the environment and improved by resources. But some people believe that recycling is good in its own right, regardless of its effect on the environment and scarce resources. Folks like Rodrick want recycling to be fully subsidized so as to lower financial obstacles to people recycling everything they can. In some places, government inspectors inspect people’s trash and fine them for not recycling everything they can. In the latter case, and perhaps in the former, that harms the environment and wastes resources.

Don’t believe me? Then consider the colored glass found in green wine and beer bottles. Colored glass is made from sand—not exactly a rare resource—that is heated and mixed with various chemicals to give it color. If tossed into a landfill, pressure slowly crumbles the glass into a powder known as “cullet” that is little different from the sand that made the bottles—so, there’s not much environmental threat from landfilling the glass. (And no, there’s no shortage of space for landfills.[3]) Yet, to recycle glass, a person has to separate his bottles from his trash, clean the bottles to prevent mold and attraction of pests, and deliver the bottles for collection by special recycling trucks (either curbside or at recycling centers). The trucks then haul the bottles—carefully, they’re glass, after all—to recycling plants where workers pick through them to make sure colored glass has been separated from clear (not to mention other trash) and then heavy machinery grinds the bottles into cullet that can be heated and turned back into glass.[4]

The problem is, when different shades of green glass are recycled, the resulting cullet isn’t green, but black. And black glass has very little use. As a result, much of the cullet ends up in landfills—after all of the sorting, cleaning, transporting and processing. It would have been a lot more efficient—that is, it would have used fewer resources and had less harmful effect on the environment—if the glass had been tossed in the trash to begin with. Yet many communities provide colored glass recycling and some communities require its recycling.

Of course, many materials are good to recycle. Aluminum cans require little energy to be collected, processed and turned into new metal. Scrap copper and old carpets typically are also cheap and environmentally sound to recycle. But then, those materials are also economically rewarding to recycle, as evidenced by the recent rash of copper thefts and by collection centers that pay for aluminum cans. Even glass sometimes can be economically and environmentally rewarding to recycle—as can be attested by anyone who remembers refillable Coca-Cola longnecks. But in other cases, it’s better to toss some materials in the trash than to recycle them.

Most human activities—including recycling—make ecological sense in some cases, but not in others. Recognizing those situations and adjusting our behavior appropriately is fundamental to good environmental stewardship. On Earth Day, that’s a good thing to remember.

Thomas A. Firey is a senior fellow with the Maryland Public Policy Institute and a Washington County native.