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The threat to our natural resources and the threat to human health should be powerful incentives to reduce the
amount of waste we generate and to recycle that which is generated. In reality, however, communities faced with competing demands on their budgets must justify waste management expenditures:
what method of waste management is the least costly to the community and its residents—recycling, incineration, landfilling?
In Texas, most communities looking at waste management options compare the costs of recycling and landfilling,
or a combination of both recycling and landfilling. This comparison is difficult to make accurately. There are few standard methods for making such comparisons, and cities rarely account for
the total cost of disposal programs—overhead, closure costs, costs of land, depreciation of equipment, and environmental problems in making such comparisons. In fact, the long-term costs of
maintaining and closing a landfill are not easily predicted. Likewise, recycling has its unpredictable costs, and local and national markets for the recovered materials go up and down. To
assist local governments make the hard choices regarding the management of municipal solid waste, the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (now the Texas Commission on Environmental
Quality) has produced a handbook entitled MSW Services Full-Cost Accounting Workbook.
Experts who study the economics of solid waste claim that no matter what solid waste management system a
community uses—incineration, recycling, or landfilling—waste disposal is something that the public must pay for, and those costs are going to continue to rise.*
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