John Tierney joins Brian Anderson to discuss why composting and recycling persist despite the lack of evidence for their efficacy.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 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 to 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 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 joins 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 Rules, and How We Can Rule It. So John Tierney, thanks very much for joining us.
John Tierney: Thank you. Brian.
Brian Anderson: 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?…