A rationale for recycling

The decision as to whether to recycle discarded objects or not has traditionally been made on a simple financial basis. However, over the last few years a popular movement has sprung up which regards recycling as a good in itself, and this movement finds itself at odds with the present financial basis for recycling. In this paper a rationale for recycling is worked out in an attempt to resolve this conflict. It is concluded that the normal market signals do not provide a proper basis for recycling decisions and that this market failure must be corrected by government intervention. However, this intervention should not take the form of uncritical support for recycling. Rather the societal objectives of individual recycling proposals should be identified and the proposal should then be evaluated in terms of whether it would achieve these objectives more effectively than some alternative action.