Waste

Waste originally implied a state of idleness. In fact, the word waste derives from the same root as vast, suggesting a negative attribution to resources that someone had not appropriated or used productively. In this vein, European settlers justified the expropriation of Native American lands by the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply. The Native American way of life, relying on hunting and gathering or even nonintensive agriculture, supposedly represented idleness compared with the more intensive European agricultural practices.

Today, waste is typically associated with the unintended consequences of activity, whether production or consumption. In a simpler world, waste products could still represent a squandered opportunity. For example, Justus von Liebig (1803–1873) justifiably reprimanded the British for polluting their water with human wastes, which could more properly be applied to replenish the soil with the nutrients from which food products originated.

Efforts to use waste products more intensively, while admirable, can create problems of their own, especially when the environment has little slack. For example, Oriental farmers famously maintained an ability to produce on the same land for forty centuries without depleting its fertility. Some did so through an intensive form of recycling. In its most elaborate form, they would apply human waste products as fertilizer. Pigs would eat garbage. Pig wastes would fertilize ponds, with ducks and fish to recycle the waste back into food products.

Unfortunately, less desirable organisms would hook into this tight network. The untreated human waste products also contributed to an epidemic of human parasites, especially intestinal worms. The close association of pigs and ducks provided a hospitable environment for the spread of influenza epidemics, in which the pathogen moved from pigs to birds to humans, a route that the modern influenza virus continues to follow. For this reason, flu seasons typically begin in Asia.

Developed societies create waste problems that are more intractable than the organic wastes of traditional societies. First, the enormous quantity of waste can overwhelm efforts to turn it to good use. For example, New York City alone produces 26,000 tons of garbage every day. The difficulty of reusing so much material productively is obvious.

Worse yet, many toxic waste products, such as radioactive materials, defy recycling—at least with the current state of scientific knowledge. When the government or organizations attempt to recycle somewhat less toxic waste, such as discarded electronic products that contain numerous heavy metals, the work takes a heavy toll on the low-wage employees who process it.

Waste also possesses a serious challenge to a laissez faire economy because waste carries no price. Naturally, those who create waste products that have negative consequences for others appreciate this situation because they would prefer to avoid any responsibility. Those with power and influence have spent millions of dollars to weaken government efforts to regulate waste. Because many waste materials circulate throughout the environment, some sort of intervention becomes necessary, especially when waste products threaten the health and safety of others. How is it possible for the market's price system to address such a problem?

Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize, in part for his suggestion that those people who find themselves on the unenviable receiving end of waste products might pay the polluters to stop or the polluters might pay those people to accept the pollution. In the case of such a transaction, both sides could be better off. In the first case, however, the people suffering from the pollution would be even better off if the pollution had never occurred.

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