Abstract
“It may be garbage to you, but it’s our bread and butter,” reads the sign on the side of a garbage truck. This reminder provides a great deal of insight into the free market environmental approach to pollution. In the first place, garbage represents a cost that does not result in a valuable output. Wasted fossil fuel, for example, means that heat energy has been produced but not transformed into useful mechanical energy. Wasted wood means that a tree has been cut into useful pieces such as dimension lumber or furniture, but that 100 percent of the tree has not been transformed into these useful pieces. In the second place, garbage or waste to one party becomes another’s “bread and butter” when the creator of the garbage must pay for its disposal. This brings us back to one of the central points of free market environmentalism, namely that there are competing uses for disposal space on the land or in the air and water. When there are property rights to the disposal space, the creator of the waste must pay the opportunity cost of using the space for which there are alternative uses. Therefore, in the case of a landfill, garbage and housing compete for the use of the land, and the garbage becomes the “bread and butter” of the landowner as long as the garbage producers must pay for the alternative uses that are forgone. Thinking about garbage as waste and as a competing use for disposal space helps us develop property rights approaches to garbage and pollution problems.
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Notes
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© 2001 Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal
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Anderson, T.L., Leal, D.R. (2001). Marketing Garbage. In: Free Market Environmentalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299736_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299736_10
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