Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast.

Today we're joined by John Tierney to discuss what he calls the most nonsensical form of municipal recycling, which is composting. This is an environmentalist passion that he points out costs a lot of money for little benefit and plenty of downsides. Now for decades, John has chronicled the problems not only with composting, but

with recycling more broadly, going all the way back to a notorious 1996 article he wrote for

the New York Times called Recycling is Garbage. More recently, John has written for a city

journal on the subject with articles including among others. Let's hold on to the throwaway

society, which was a defense

of plastic bags and other disposable products. John's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

He's a contributing editor of City Journal. He joined CJ after more than two decades as a reporter

and columnist with the New York Times, and he's the author of numerous books, including most recently,

The Power of Bad, How the Negativity Effect Times, and he's the author of numerous books, including most recently, The Power of

Bad, How the Negativity Effect Rules and How We Can Rule It. So John Tierney, thanks very much

for joining us. Thank you, Brian. For readers who don't compost and may not even know what it is,

can you just give a general description of what composting is

and how it fits into the larger environmentalist framework of recycling and similar policies?

Well, the idea that New Yorkers now are facing fines or will be soon, if they don't separate all

their organic waste, what the city is demanding and what some other cities are also doing is you have to separate all your food scraps and also yard waste if you have that.

And they all have to go into a separate bin that is collected separately.

And these are taken to composting facilities.

Or in New York, some of it is being sent to this facility that will

convert some of this organic waste into natural gas. And some of it goes to compost and facilities

then create composts that are sold to gardeners and other things. And of all the forms of recycling,

I mean, I've written for a long time, as you said, about how much it costs, you know, how expensive recycling is, how time consuming it is. I mean, when I talk about how expensive it is, I'm only talking about how much money New York City and other cities pay to do it, you know, how much cheaper would be to just send stuff to a landfill. The biggest cost of all, which I, you know, back of that artifice I wrote in the 90s, is the cost of people's time and having to do all this garbage sorting. And if you actually factor that in, I did these calculations about if you paid a janitorial wage for those few minutes a week that you spend sorting garbage, it's just as absurdly, it's more expensive than anything. It's cost more

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