Cost of Recycling

• The cost of recycling is far higher than just throwing all the trash into a landfill. According to the San Jose, California, government liason, it costs the city only $28 per ton of trash to put it in a landfill, while recycling costs nearly $150 per ton. The cost difference is astounding, and it isn't the city picking up the tab; it is the taxpayers. The city also has to pay private companies to come and take the recycled materials off their hands.

Price of Materials

• Recycled materials are more costly than "virgin" materials--materials that have not yet been recycled. It has also caused the prices of these virgin materials to rise. Since recycled materials have become readily available and the techniques are getting more refined, the price of paper has gone from $10 to $15 per ton to $100 to $200 per ton, a nearly 1000 percent increase in price, according to Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP). Plastic and aluminum have seen similar gains in price, rising from $100 to $150 a ton to nearly $200 to $300 per ton for plastic, and from $640 to $740 per ton to $840 to $1060 per ton for aluminum.

Resource Depletion

• The biggest reason people declare for recycling is that it saves us from depleting our natural resources. However, the items we are recycling--paper, glass, steel, aluminum and plastic--are in no danger of of running out anytime soon. Items such as paper come from trees, which is a renewable resource, and glass comes from sand, which is one of the most abundant resources on the planet, according to envirovaluation.org. So, recycling these materials, considering the cost of doing so, may make little sense. The only item we might be in danger of running out of is plastic, because it is made from oil, and each day our supply is being depleted.