At periodic intervals, virtuous Americans prepare special offerings and deposit them in designated public receptacles. There are special icons associated with this activity and a ministry to spread the message at schools and children's events, at retreats for teachers and other government functionaries, on billboards and bus displays, in public service announcements and magazine advertisements. There is even a magician, R.E. Cycle.

The activity resembles nothing so much as a religious ritual, performed in obeisance to a new god called The Environment. (The Environment is not simply the world or the earth and is emphatically not the Creation.)

The object is salvation-of the Environment-but there are also supposed to be practical savings realized from more efficient use of resources. The benefits are supposed to accrue to all. However, as with the sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages, there are some who appear to reap a substantial, immediate, tangible profit.

A growing number of states and cities are enacting mandatory recycling laws, and the Clinton Administration promises to do so at the federal level. New Jersey has the most comprehensive mandatory household recycling law in the nation.

The results of the New Jersey law should be carefully studied before the model is implemented elsewhere (see Grant W. Schaumberg, Jr., and Katherine T. Doyle, ``Wasting Resources to Reduce Waste: Recycling in New Jersey,'' Policy Analysis #202, January 26, 1994, $4 from the Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20001).

The net result of the New Jersey law: About 0.5 million tons of waste (less than 4% of total targeted municipal wastes) are recycled per year at a net cost of around $80 million per year ($160 per ton). That is the cost after subtracting the value of the salvaged material and the cost of landfill disposal.

Statistics on the amount recycled are unreliable; the figures produced by two official state sources differ by as much as a factor of five. Because a recycling broker, market, and municipality can each get credit for recycling the same ton of material, the totals may be double or triple counted. Additionally, there is an incentive to inflate the figures because to do so increases tonnage grant revenues.

The beneficiaries of the state law include:

1. Owners of distant landfills, who are able to charge as much as $70 per ton ($5 million per acre)─compared with the normal cost of building and operating a modern landfill of less than $10 to $30 per ton-thanks to Governor Florio's war on nearby landfills;

2. Quasi-governmental regulatory bodies, such as the Mercer County Improvement Authority, which receive increased revenues and justification for their existence;

3. Local authorities, which receive tonnage grants;

4. Waste management firms and recycling industries; and

5. Public relations firms.

(In EPA-dominated state projects for prioritizing environmental risks, government and ``public interest'' organizations are called ``stakeholders.'' The reason may be illuminated by a reaction that Schaumburg and Doyle encountered in the course of their research: ``I don't want to lose my job. This better not show up in a newspaper....I don't need to provide you with information.'')

The sacrifices are borne by New Jersey residents and businessmen, who must pay the additional costs of sorting, transporting, and processing the materials, plus the administrative cost of $3 to $7 per ton. The labor of each household that sorts its trash adds $22 to $130 per year to recycling costs if they spend only 5 to 15 minutes per week on the task and their labor is valued at $5 to $10 per hour.

Reusing scrap metal, aluminum cans, newsprint, and corrugated cardboard was widespread before the mandatory New Jersey program, without the additional overhead imposed by the law, because people had determined that the benefits to them outweighed their costs. Now, the human costs and benefits are subservient to those of The Environment.

Over ten years, the New Jersey program will spare The Environment the ravages of a landfill half a mile on each side. (The unusable ``recyclables'' will be piled somewhere else.) For perspective, all the trash generated at current rates in our most densely populated state over the next 1,000 years could fit in a landfill less than 30 square miles in size, or less than half that size with advanced compaction technology.

What really happens in a landfill? The landfill is a site of true, natural recycling─in contrast to the politically mandated artificial ``recycling'' that is more accurately called scavenging and reusing (after cleaning, shredding, smashing, or otherwise processing the material). The major recyclers are insects and microorganisms that gradually turn our waste (their food) into carbon dioxide, water, and other metabolic products.

Besides the usual organisms of decay, specialists are being cultivated to deal with problems more esoteric than everyday municipal garbage. There are species of bacteria that will eat almost anything: petroleum products, CFCs, iron, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The jimson weed (a relative of the deadly nightshade) will eat plutonium. And East German chemists are isolating strains of bacteria that digest the resins making up the body of the Trabant, a two-stroke East German car, reducing it to 10 kg of residual biomass.

Landfills recycle very slowly. A form of oxidation that is far more rapid than metabolism (and even more politically incorrect) is combustion, or incineration. The main products of combustion are of course carbon dioxide and water. These ``waste'' products are the building blocks of all living things. They are recycled back into organic compounds by plants, through photosynthesis. The increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have fertilized the biosphere, causing a population explosion among trees (see Access to Energy, November and December, 1993, available from PO Box 1250, Cave Junction, OR 97523, subscriptions $25/yr).

Both metabolism and combustion do have byproducts that can be called ``pollutants.'' However, so does politically mandated recycling. De-inking 100 tons of old newspaper generates 40 tons of toxic waste. Thirteen of the 50 worst sites on the Superfund National Priority List are recycling facilities (National Environment Digest, 9/17/91, cited by Schaumberg and Doyle).

To make the optimal decisions about handling the inevitable byproducts of human life, the tools should be those of science and economics-not of Earth Worship.

The Eleventh Annual meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness will be held on August 27-28 in Tucson, Arizona, in a hotel that still enjoys the benefits of CFC-12 or freon (air conditioning). The meeting will focus on the internal threats to Western civilization from fraudulent science. Mark your calendars now!