<p>In the classical model, recycling (and most other changes in modes of consumption) doesn't change employment either way in the long term. The jobs gained by recycling are lost from other sectors and the jobs lost are gained. </p>

<p>Shifting away from the classical model, there are short term changes in employment from shocks in which recycling as a profession becomes more or less attractive to the point to induce workers to change jobs. During that switch unemployment will increase, but over time it should settle to its "natural" rate (which is determined by a host of unrelated factors).</p>

<p>Another factor in employment is in the skills possessed and required for jobs. Maybe many of the people currently employed in recycling are very low-skill workers. If these people lose their current jobs it may be difficult to find a job that they meet the requirements for. That would increase unemployment.</p>

<p>If recycling is actually less beneficial than the alternatives (as glass specifically may be), then employment in the long run may decrease as the economy becomes healthier.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T20:39:15.003Z
2019-10-16T20:39:15.003Z
gormadoc
<p>Any invention that replaces human labor puts an end to that specific task. Glass recycling eliminates (or decrease) the need for silica-gathering task. Typewriter eliminates the need for printing press typesetter. Etc.</p>

<p>Those people whose tasks are eliminated will get reallocated to their most productive use. This might be in the form of job change (silica miner move to coal miner), or might be in the form of task redefinition (the book <a href="https://www.predictionmachines.ai" rel="noreferrer"><em>Prediction Machines</em></a> describe how self-driving school bus might shift the main task of a school bus driver to an adult who oversees and "teaches" the schoolchildren.)</p>

<p>Going back to your question, recycling also <em>creates</em> new jobs. They need people to sort bottles, maybe drive a recycling truck, etc. So whether an invention leads to more or less job is ambiguous.</p>

<p><strong>Added</strong>: While the effect on a specific industry might be quantifiable, if you take into account job mobility, etc. then the effect on the whole labor market is ambiguous.</p>

<p>Regardless, an invention that increases productivity should increase the size of the pie. We can produce more from the same resources. How that bigger pie is divided, however, is another very important question altogether.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T02:59:37.380Z
(Re 3rd para) It's ambiguous only if we don't get into the specifics of each industry. Otherwise one may be able to answer it one way or the other for specific production and recycling processes.
fantastic peace and prosperity
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T05:28:36.080Z
Well my argument would be if the point of recyling is that it is more economic then almost by definition it requires less labour. So if it created new jobs that would be a contradiction.
zooby
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T07:06:35.693Z
"Therefor could I make the case that not recycling my glass bottle is helping with employment **[in the recycling industry]**? On the other hand, recycling might be helping the economy as a whole and there might be more money in the economy for public sector jobs?" I'd say both are correct.
Art
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T13:56:09.903Z
Just to extend with an example: in 1900, 40% of jobs were agricultural. In 2000, 2% of jobs were agricultural. If you ask people from 1900, they'll assume that the other 38% living in the year 2000 are now unemployed, because people from 1900 don't know what a sofware developer, SEO expert, smartphone manufacturer, ... is and they can't account for the employment that accompanies it. People will always find something to do. Automating a menial task opens the market to finding something more productive to do with the manhours saved through automation.
Flater
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T13:59:13.710Z
@zooby: The main point of recycling is not to lower manhours, but to lower environmental impact. This means that recycling does not necessarily lead to less employment. Consider the difference in needing to hire people to sort and wash the recycled glass, compared to indiscriminately throwing it all in a landfill and mining more silica. In theory, it's perfectly possible that glass sorting/washing leads to more jobs than the silica mining sector would lose out on. It might not be the case for glass specifically, but the general point still stands.
Flater
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T14:01:13.693Z
@zooby: Compare this to e.g. SpaceX recycling its booster rockets. Here, the main incentive is to not have to build new boosters (which takes more time and effort than fixing a spent one), and the main goal _is_ to lower manhours spent. For this example, your argument is valid, but you'd still miss the point that lowered hours would lead to more/cheaper launches, rather than the frequency of launches being unchanged and less labor being available.
Flater
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T16:37:07.260Z
@zooby Why does "more economic" mean requiring less labor, and why does less labor imply fewer jobs? Me sending this comment to you and anyone else viewing this site requires vastly less labor than physically writing a letter several thousand times, requiring postal workers to carry them everywhere and all that jazz... but this site and the infrastructure it lives on likely provide more employment than that postal service. Sending a given message takes less labor, therefor the number of messages sent ends up scaling by a few orders of magnitude.
Delioth
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T21:57:19.340Z
@Delioth: Less labor does incentivize a company to take on fewer jobs (_unless_ they are able to just increase the workload - but then it's not "less labor" anymore either). Employees are effectively manhours to a company. When you need fewer manhours, you need fewer employees. No one is going to pay their employees for the hours they don't need to work due to lowered labor.
Flater
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-17T18:03:40.250Z
@Flater zoomed in to a specific employer, that might be true, but that frees up labor to do _more things_, elsewhere. (this is itself a messy process that glosses over a lot of negative effects, particularly when entire classes of job skills become obsolete, as we are seeing today with the mass deployment of automation)
asgallant
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-17T21:17:24.903Z
@asgallant: Not necessarily elsewhere. For example, a really efficient glassware economy can upscale and start using glass for more things, thus increasing their output (and labor). Consider how the chipset manufacturing industry evolved from bulky desktops to every you see nowadays (down to Arduinos/IoT devices). Amply available resources tend to find more varied applications and thus an even bigger market, _increasing_ jobs in the long run.
Flater
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-18T02:53:50.297Z
@Flater my apologies, I experienced a spontaneous reading comprehension error when traversing the comments here. Broadly speaking, I agree with you.
asgallant
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T02:20:52.463Z
2019-10-16T07:08:22.150Z
2019-10-16T07:08:22.150Z
Art
<p>Say I buy a glass bottle, I can either put it in the landfill or recycle it.
My understanding is, glass will breakdown into sand. (Not sure how well though, since we sometimes find glass from Roman times.) Alternatively we can recycle it.</p>

<p>But I was wondering wouldn't this put some people out of work? Such as the people who have to mine all the silica for use in making the glass in the first place. And considering it is more economic to recycle glass, this seems like fewer humans would be needed.</p>

<p>Therefore could I make the case that not recycling my glass bottle is helping with employment. On the other hand, recycling might be helping the economy as a whole and there might be more money in the economy for public sector jobs. Which is right?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T08:11:41.017Z
Are you asking "which is right" in [economics] theory, or in practice? You've already received the theoretical answer: it's an ambiguous effect without getting into specifics of production & recycling processes [or any aggregate labor statistics of those, which do actually exist]. But you already seem to sense that theoretical ambiguity. So is your question about empirical evidence?
fantastic peace and prosperity
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T08:47:53.420Z
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Sneftel
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T15:44:06.597Z
@Sneftel I see. So the money saved by the glass company in collecting silca means they can spend the money on other things. Granted this is true. However, I may caution that if the silca industry is local but the money saved is spent internationally, then in fact money will be taken out of the economy.  And vice-versa.
zooby
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T15:48:21.190Z
The point of the broken window fallacy is that you cannot create value by destroying value, not that you cannot manipulate economic forces such that there are winners and losers. "The Economy" is not "a particular country's economy".
Sneftel
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T15:52:17.363Z
@Sneftel What if you destroyed some houses to make way for a high speed motorway?
zooby
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T15:54:28.913Z
@zooby If the net benefit were positive, it would be the creation of the motorway -- and, distally, the creation of the right-of-way for the motorway -- which led to that benefit, rather than the resources spent by the homeowners to replace those destroyed houses.
Sneftel
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T17:35:47.670Z
You could throw all your garbage on the ground to create more work for janitors and cleanup crews.  You could start fires to make more work for firefighters and rescue operators.  You could become a bank robber to create more work for police and other security personnel.  You could become a serial killer to create more work for forensics analysts and coroners.  This argument could be taken to any extreme, but none of these contribute to the overall betterment of society.
Darrel Hoffman
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T19:46:11.370Z
Are you specifically asking about glass or in general? Are you concerned with employment numbers or general strength of the economy? Glass is somewhat unique among common recyclables in that it's both extremely cheap right now and that recycling doesn't promise the environmental benefits that other commodity recycling processes have. Glass recycling has collapsed in much of the US because it's simply not worth it. That would indicate that arbitrarily increasing the numbers (always at the expense of something else) would be a drag on the economy, likely hurting employment.
gormadoc
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-16T21:27:50.937Z
Is a job valuable if it comes with unacceptable externalities?
Beanluc
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-17T16:12:53.703Z
@DarrelHoffman Murdering people also reduces unemployment. If the victim had a job, there is now an open job to be filled by an unemployed person. If the victim was unemployed themselves, there is now one less unemployed person increasing the unemployment rate :) (too bad that there is now also one less consumer to create demand, so the net effect on the employment market would be zero)
Philipp
<labor-economics><productivity><environmental-economics><automation>
Does recycling lead to fewer jobs?
zooby
# Does recycling lead to fewer jobs?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2019-10-15)

Say I buy a glass bottle, I can either put it in the landfill or recycle it.
My understanding is, glass will breakdown into sand. (Not sure how well though, since we sometimes find glass from Roman times.) Alternatively we can recycle it.

But I was wondering wouldn't this put some people out of work? Such as the people who have to mine all the silica for use in making the glass in the first place. And considering it is more economic to recycle glass, this seems like fewer humans would be needed.

Therefore could I make the case that not recycling my glass bottle is helping with employment. On the other hand, recycling might be helping the economy as a whole and there might be more money in the economy for public sector jobs. Which is right?

**Tags:** labor-economics, productivity, environmental-economics, automation
> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Are you asking "which is right" in [economics] theory, or in practice? You've already received the theoretical answer: it's an ambiguous effect without getting into specifics of production & recycling processes [or any aggregate labor statistics of those, which do actually exist]. But you already seem to sense that theoretical ambiguity. So is your question about empirical evidence?  
> **username_2**: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window  
> **username_0**: @Sneftel I see. So the money saved by the glass company in collecting silca means they can spend the money on other things. Granted this is true. However, I may caution that if the silca industry is local but the money saved is spent internationally, then in fact money will be taken out of the economy.  And vice-versa.  
> **username_2**: The point of the broken window fallacy is that you cannot create value by destroying value, not that you cannot manipulate economic forces such that there are winners and losers. "The Economy" is not "a particular country's economy".  
> **username_0**: @Sneftel What if you destroyed some houses to make way for a high speed motorway?  
> **username_2**: @zooby If the net benefit were positive, it would be the creation of the motorway -- and, distally, the creation of the right-of-way for the motorway -- which led to that benefit, rather than the resources spent by the homeowners to replace those destroyed houses.  
> **username_3**: You could throw all your garbage on the ground to create more work for janitors and cleanup crews.  You could start fires to make more work for firefighters and rescue operators.  You could become a bank robber to create more work for police and other security personnel.  You could become a serial killer to create more work for forensics analysts and coroners.  This argument could be taken to any extreme, but none of these contribute to the overall betterment of society.  
> **username_4**: Are you specifically asking about glass or in general? Are you concerned with employment numbers or general strength of the economy? Glass is somewhat unique among common recyclables in that it's both extremely cheap right now and that recycling doesn't promise the environmental benefits that other commodity recycling processes have. Glass recycling has collapsed in much of the US because it's simply not worth it. That would indicate that arbitrarily increasing the numbers (always at the expense of something else) would be a drag on the economy, likely hurting employment.  
> **username_5**: Is a job valuable if it comes with unacceptable externalities?  
> **username_6**: @DarrelHoffman Murdering people also reduces unemployment. If the victim had a job, there is now an open job to be filled by an unemployed person. If the victim was unemployed themselves, there is now one less unemployed person increasing the unemployment rate :) (too bad that there is now also one less consumer to create demand, so the net effect on the employment market would be zero)  

---

## 2 answers

### Answer by username_7 on 2019-10-16. Score: 32 | Accepted answer

Any invention that replaces human labor puts an end to that specific task. Glass recycling eliminates (or decrease) the need for silica-gathering task. Typewriter eliminates the need for printing press typesetter. Etc.

Those people whose tasks are eliminated will get reallocated to their most productive use. This might be in the form of job change (silica miner move to coal miner), or might be in the form of task redefinition (the book [*Prediction Machines*](https://www.predictionmachines.ai) describe how self-driving school bus might shift the main task of a school bus driver to an adult who oversees and "teaches" the schoolchildren.)

Going back to your question, recycling also *creates* new jobs. They need people to sort bottles, maybe drive a recycling truck, etc. So whether an invention leads to more or less job is ambiguous.

**Added**: While the effect on a specific industry might be quantifiable, if you take into account job mobility, etc. then the effect on the whole labor market is ambiguous.

Regardless, an invention that increases productivity should increase the size of the pie. We can produce more from the same resources. How that bigger pie is divided, however, is another very important question altogether.

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: (Re 3rd para) It's ambiguous only if we don't get into the specifics of each industry. Otherwise one may be able to answer it one way or the other for specific production and recycling processes.  
> **username_0**: Well my argument would be if the point of recyling is that it is more economic then almost by definition it requires less labour. So if it created new jobs that would be a contradiction.  
> **username_7**: "Therefor could I make the case that not recycling my glass bottle is helping with employment **[in the recycling industry]**? On the other hand, recycling might be helping the economy as a whole and there might be more money in the economy for public sector jobs?" I'd say both are correct.  
> **username_8**: Just to extend with an example: in 1900, 40% of jobs were agricultural. In 2000, 2% of jobs were agricultural. If you ask people from 1900, they'll assume that the other 38% living in the year 2000 are now unemployed, because people from 1900 don't know what a sofware developer, SEO expert, smartphone manufacturer, ... is and they can't account for the employment that accompanies it. People will always find something to do. Automating a menial task opens the market to finding something more productive to do with the manhours saved through automation.  
> **username_8**: @zooby: The main point of recycling is not to lower manhours, but to lower environmental impact. This means that recycling does not necessarily lead to less employment. Consider the difference in needing to hire people to sort and wash the recycled glass, compared to indiscriminately throwing it all in a landfill and mining more silica. In theory, it's perfectly possible that glass sorting/washing leads to more jobs than the silica mining sector would lose out on. It might not be the case for glass specifically, but the general point still stands.  
> **username_8**: @zooby: Compare this to e.g. SpaceX recycling its booster rockets. Here, the main incentive is to not have to build new boosters (which takes more time and effort than fixing a spent one), and the main goal _is_ to lower manhours spent. For this example, your argument is valid, but you'd still miss the point that lowered hours would lead to more/cheaper launches, rather than the frequency of launches being unchanged and less labor being available.  
> **username_9**: @zooby Why does "more economic" mean requiring less labor, and why does less labor imply fewer jobs? Me sending this comment to you and anyone else viewing this site requires vastly less labor than physically writing a letter several thousand times, requiring postal workers to carry them everywhere and all that jazz... but this site and the infrastructure it lives on likely provide more employment than that postal service. Sending a given message takes less labor, therefor the number of messages sent ends up scaling by a few orders of magnitude.  
> **username_8**: @Delioth: Less labor does incentivize a company to take on fewer jobs (_unless_ they are able to just increase the workload - but then it's not "less labor" anymore either). Employees are effectively manhours to a company. When you need fewer manhours, you need fewer employees. No one is going to pay their employees for the hours they don't need to work due to lowered labor.  
> **username_10**: @Flater zoomed in to a specific employer, that might be true, but that frees up labor to do _more things_, elsewhere. (this is itself a messy process that glosses over a lot of negative effects, particularly when entire classes of job skills become obsolete, as we are seeing today with the mass deployment of automation)  
> **username_8**: @asgallant: Not necessarily elsewhere. For example, a really efficient glassware economy can upscale and start using glass for more things, thus increasing their output (and labor). Consider how the chipset manufacturing industry evolved from bulky desktops to every you see nowadays (down to Arduinos/IoT devices). Amply available resources tend to find more varied applications and thus an even bigger market, _increasing_ jobs in the long run.  
> **username_10**: @Flater my apologies, I experienced a spontaneous reading comprehension error when traversing the comments here. Broadly speaking, I agree with you.  

---

### Answer by username_4 on 2019-10-16. Score: 1

In the classical model, recycling (and most other changes in modes of consumption) doesn't change employment either way in the long term. The jobs gained by recycling are lost from other sectors and the jobs lost are gained.

Shifting away from the classical model, there are short term changes in employment from shocks in which recycling as a profession becomes more or less attractive to the point to induce workers to change jobs. During that switch unemployment will increase, but over time it should settle to its "natural" rate (which is determined by a host of unrelated factors).

Another factor in employment is in the skills possessed and required for jobs. Maybe many of the people currently employed in recycling are very low-skill workers. If these people lose their current jobs it may be difficult to find a job that they meet the requirements for. That would increase unemployment.

If recycling is actually less beneficial than the alternatives (as glass specifically may be), then employment in the long run may decrease as the economy becomes healthier.


---

