Read the full commentary in Waste Age.
You probably remember the movie “Field of Dreams.” It starred Kevin Costner as a farmer who believed that if he built a baseball stadium in the back forty, people would come to watch games. No market studies or economic analysis were needed. Just a cornfield and a dream.
Disposal bans follow a similar logic. Banning a material from disposal — be it grass clippings, a computer or plastic bottles — will cause a recycling system to immediately spring into place for those products. The banned material is now guaranteed a useful afterlife.
Of course, these bans are just an extreme form of the strategy employed by most state recycling laws. Those laws do a good job of creating supplies of materials but usually fail to create corresponding markets for them. However, disposal bans differ in that they have the ability to do far more harm than good. As a recent report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), “Managing Electronics Waste: Issues with Exporting E-Waste,” shows, serious problems are created when well-intentioned people act without considering the consequences.
