The net benefits of the New York City solid waste management program

In response to the growing scarcity of landfill facilities the City of New York has developed a solid waste management program consisting of incineration, landfilling and recycling 15 percent of the City's waste stream. The City's approach to solving the problem supports the thesis that increasing the amount of material recycled to 25 percent will result in minimizing the waste disposal costs and increase the long-term intergenerational benefits to the residents of New York City.;If the New York City Department of Sanitation (NYC DOS) fails to implement a solid waste management program consisting of a combination of recycling and waste-to-energy facilities to meet the City's long-term solid waste disposal demand, the estimated discounted total social baseline cost of waste disposal to the residents of the City, expressed in terms of 1989 dollars, would increase from ;If the waste-to-energy facility program proposed by the NYC DOS to the Board of Estimate is implemented and combined with a program to recover 15 percent of the waste stream for recycling by 1994, economic benefits would be created that would reduce the discounted net costs from ;If the level of material recovered for recycling is increased to 25 percent by 1994 the discounted net costs of waste disposal falls still further from ;The decline in the discounted net cost of waste disposal is a direct result of evaluating the economic benefits of a combination of approaches consisting of recycling and waste-to-energy facilities in terms of the cost savings realized by avoiding the need to landfill the City's waste and the revenue generated by the sale of recyclable material.;The result of analyzing these three approaches to dealing with the solid waste problem in NYC clearly suggests that a program to recycle at least 25 percent of the City's waste stream combined with waste-to-energy facilities will produce the least waste disposal cost for the residents of New York City and will also maximize the social welfare of future generations in the City.