Recycling in New York

A puff piece about recycling in New York is here:
Paper dreams a cardboard reality - West Shore - SILive.com

Some opposing views are here, in a 2002 article entitled "Recycling: It's a bad idea in New York":

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, desperate to dig the city out of a $4.8-billion deficit, caused a minor uproar recently by recommending the elimination of the city's extravagant recycling program. In doing so, he ripped away the veil on one of the biggest boondoggles of recent times.

Despite flowery promises and earnest intentions, mandatory municipal recycling programs across the United States have proven an expensive economic and environmental flop. Little sustains this odd brand of civic religion beyond the quasi-religious devotion of the Green faithful.
...
Moreover, it's the energy costs associated with recycling—the additional collection services, shipping costs, and industrial processing necessary to tear apart a newspaper, for instance, into reusable material—that contribute to its high costs.
...
In fact, recycling is almost certainly worse for the environment than landfilling. After all, the process of extracting usable raw material from a manufactured product is an industrial activity every bit as involved as the process of combining various raw materials to manufacture a product in the first place. Both processes are energy and chemically intensive. And both create waste.

Recycling 100 tons of old newsprint, for instance, generates tons of toxic waste. Is this consequential? Sure. The Environmental Protection Agency reported some years ago that 13 of America's 50 worst Superfund sites are or were recycling facilities.

Finally, we're constantly told recycling creates jobs. But let's face it: These are miserable jobs at miserable wages, and we've got plenty of those. Moreover, the argument neglects the jobs that aren't being created because New York City is taking $57 million a year out of the economy (actually, about $103 million accounting for the deadweight losses associated with the tax system) to pay for this make-work labor.

Banning farm machinery would create a lot of jobs too, but nobody in their right mind would advocate it. Why, then, do we entertain recycling’s brand of that same nonsense?

When recycling makes economic sense, government doesn't have to mandate it or subsidize it. Somebody in the private sector will be happy to pay you for your garbage or, alternatively, charge you less for recycling services than for landfilling services. If people want to recycle regardless—simply because it makes them feel better about themselves—that's their right. But let them spend their own time and money to do it.