Munger and more Munger

ah, alright, gotcha. Thought you were talking about some sort of government subsidy you were getting for doing this.

Carry on! :)

Shawn,

Whoever has to pay to send their wastes to a landfill can do business with me for less then the landfill tipping fees. And because of my centralized location, I can also save them money on transportation costs, as landfills tend to be well outside of town.

david...you confused who said what there, but anyway. If you get "paid to take somebody else's 'garbage'", who is it exactly that's paying you?

I recycle, bu only to agument the amount of garbage the garbage man hauls away. In a sense, they don't pay me, but they at least give me a credit.

Consequently, the threshold of what I'll throw in the green recycling bin goes down as my total garbage output goes up.

Jon,

My technology is a very simple interlocking system that would be cost-effective if we made it out of materials we had to pay for -- e.g., common clay soil -- and getting paid to take somebody else's "garbage" only makes us more competitive.

Shawn,

We only use certifiably non-hazardous materials in a process that is essentially as old as the hills, which is why we say that we're "the newest way to build the oldest way."

No "enviro-wackiness," in other words.

Munger wrote a neat essay.

But I think it was a sly parody on economics and environmentalism gone wild.

Ben just made a good comment. Recycling is about acting today to lessen future problems.

It may very well be costly. Well, so what? There are costs to other desirable goods and services too.

The essay frames recycling as a static process which also doesn't work very well.

Probably so. Restudy the process. Make it work better and recycle more materials into more product. And learn how to produce higher quality outputs.

A good place for some research dollars.

I would rather pay for that than for another NASA launch to send five people around the Earth doing roughly what has been done repeatedly for 25 years.

Garbage has a negative value--you have to pay someone to take it off your hands.

There's no need to complicate matters by introducing notions of "positive" and "negative" value; garbage collection (and I suppose you could involve plumbing & sewerage systems in that) is a valuable service because possessing a property which is clean & tidy is important and desirable for most people, that's all.

That's all well and good, until those building materials are shown to be not as durable or emit toxins. I heard horror stories about stuff like that before.

Not that your materials are going to do it, I'm just saying, is all. There are real dangers in some of the enviro-wackiness.

david...if you can sell your green building technology, then great. However, I'd bet that it's going to be regulation that will get it "sold" before an actual cost savings. essentially, regulation will raise the cost of 'traditional' building materials before their scarcity drops the price below your remanufactured product.

Glad you're working on it, though...hope it works out. :)

Watch Penn&Teller's show "Bullshit" on recycling.

It's brilliant.

Munger writes: "If someone will pay you for the item, it's a resource. ... But if you have to pay someone to take the item away, ... then the item is garbage."

Yes, but it's a two-way street -- i.e., it's not the item itself but who has a use for it and who doesn't.

For instance, I'm commercializing a green building technology based in large part on getting paid to take materials (e.g., spent foundry sand, construction & demolition debris, and yes, incinerator ash) that would otherwise be dumped in landfills and turning them into high-quality, low-cost building products.

Thus, one man's garbage is another man's resource, just as one man's poison is another man's meat. And as landfill tipping fees rise amid NIMBY land-use constraints, we will see this relationship played out more and more, until it makes no sense, economically speaking, to bury anything in the ground.

I listened to the entire podcast. I was really struck by how right Munger was about looking at recycling in terms of which uses the least resources (recycling vs. landfilling). In our area, the waste authority actually burns some of the garbage to generate power to run the landfill operations including some admin buildings, recycle plant, motor pool, etc. I doubt seriously whether this is an economical way of getting energy since only some of the garbage can be burned and it's a terribly inefficient way of getting electricity out of raw waste. In the end, they tend to landfill at least half of the "recyclables" because it just costs too much (or as Munger put it, it uses more resources than it returns) and can't be burned for energy at the plant. Penn and Teller did an online video about this subject and drew the same conclusion-except for aluminum cans, most of the other should (and usually does) go right into a landfill...which, strangely enough saves more resources. Ain't economics beautiful?