Indeed, a year ago John Tierney wrote a devastating article for The New York Times Magazine titled "Recyling is Garbage." He declared that the emperor had no clothes: "Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources."

His points were many. For instance, packaging saves resources, reducing food spoilage. Fast-food meals generate less trash per person than do home-cooked meals. The cheapest way to dispose of garbage is in a landfill. Modern dumps incorporate a range of safeguards and take up a minuscule amount of space.

A. Clark Wiseman of Spokane's Gonzaga University figures that, at the current rate, Americans could put all of the trash generated over the next 1,000 years into a landfill 100 yards high and 35 miles square. Or dig a similar-size hole and plant grass on top after it was filled.

Recycling, in contrast, costs money. New York City's mandatory program spends $200 more per ton to collect recyclables than it would cost to bury them, and another $40 per ton to pay a company to process them. Tierney figures the value of the private labor wasted complying with the rules (rinsing, taking off labels, sorting) to be literally hundreds of dollars more per ton.

Yet there is no environmental reason to recycle trash. Resources are not scarce. In fact, much newsprint comes from trees grown for that specific purpose. Even Worldwatch, a reliably hysterical group that has constantly (though luckily, so far inaccurately) predicted impending environmental doom, now acknowledges: "The question of scarcity may never have been the most important one."

Moreover, making recyclables generates waste. For instance, producing paperboard burger containers yields more air and water pollution and consumes more energy than does manufacturing polystyrene clamshells. It takes more water to recycle newsprint than to make it afresh.

How can such a wasteful practice persist? Tierney concluded: "By turning garbage into a political issue, environmentalists have created jobs for themselves as lawyers, lobbyists, researchers, educators and moral guardians. Environmentalists may genuinely believe they're helping the Earth, but they have been hurting the common good while profiting personally."

Think about how many trees it can be saved by recycling paper.

Yet there is no environmental reason to recycle trash. Resources are not scarce. In fact, much newsprint comes from trees grown for that specific purpose. Even Worldwatch, a reliably hysterical group that has constantly (though luckily, so far inaccurately) predicted impending environmental doom, now acknowledges: "The question of scarcity may never have been the most important one."

Would you build your house on a landfill, or send your kid to a school built on one?

Recycling has changed the mindset of a generation. Just having people think about what happens to the crap they generate is a step forward from our resource greedy past.