RECYCLING MATTERS

Recycling has caught on across the nation mainly because of the need to conserve depleted landfill space. Reducing the amount of materials going into the waste stream, the experts tell us, is the only way to save valuable dumping space.

Cities everywhere are trying to recycle as much garbage as possible. Cape Girardeau is no exception. The city collects and recycles glass, plastic, steel, tin, aluminum cans, newspaper, magazines and corrugated cardboard. Officials also are trying to secure a market for other types of paper trash.

Why the rush to expand recycling? After all, if there is a market for recycling, as there is with aluminum cans, for example, most cost-conscious consumers gladly would do it themselves. The reason cities like Cape Girardeau recycle items of limited usefulness and marketability is because the government says they must.

Missouri's solid waste law mandates a 40 percent reduction by 1998 in the amount of waste going into landfills. But when laws are passed, whether on the local, state or national level, without taking into account market forces, the cost of compliance can be burdensome. That cost falls inevitably on consumers. In Cape Girardeau, nearly a fourth of residents' trash bills is earmarked for recycling.

It is difficult to justify recycling materials that are easily replenished. Newsprint is a renewable resource, and trees are planted at a rate that exceeds their consumption for newsprint. By recycling newspapers, then, the resource being conserved is dumping space.

But why aren't landfills -- essentially a spot of land in which to bury trash -- also renewable? Because landfills are highly regulated spots of land. So much so, that they are difficult to open and terribly expensive to operate.

Short of lessening landfill regulations -- there are legitimate reasons to regulate what amounts to cultivated pollution -- other methods of disposal must be considered. New ways to burn trash through clean and efficient incinerators should be an option, along with recycling where markets exist, to burying trash.

The energy generated through incineration is a marketable resource for many types of trash for which cities are desperately scrambling to find and keep open recycling markets. When those markets fail, it is conceivable that some of the waste that is being recycled, at a relatively high cost, ends up in a landfill anyway.

Before looking for more dubious recycling markets for trash, officials ought to bring pressure to bear on elected officials to find other disposal options.