On the road to Liberty

There is a fine difference between a resource and waste. A waste becomes a resource when someone is willing to pay the owner to acquire it; it remains a waste if the owner has to pay someone to dispose of it. I look at the debate over ship-breaking in this article, " Breaking the set notion ", published in the Hindustan Times, on 13 January 2006. More than 150 years ago, the French economist and legislator Frederic Bastiat had written “There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.” The present debate over the decommissioned French aircraft carrier, Clemenceau, being sent to Alang in Gujarat for dismantling and recycling highlights the relevance of Bastiat’s idea of “what is seen and what is not seen”. Clemenceau is a 265-m long ship, weighing about 26,000 tons. Recycling it could open ...

My article titled "Poverty, Wealth and Waste" is Reproduced from the March 2000 issue of PERC Reports. The original pdf version of the journal is available here . PERC, a think tank based in Bozeman, Montana, USA, is dedicated to Providing Market Solutions to Environmental Problems. In 1986, a waste-to-energy plant opened in Delhi, India, financed by the Danish International Development Agency at a cost of over $10 million. The plant was expected to generate 3.8 mw of electricity from garbage, and its success was to be copied in other Indian cities. However, the plant was a failure. Two years later, the government was spending about $100,000 a year to burn garbage without producing energy. Surprisingly, the principal reason was the fact that there wasn’t enough urban waste in Delhi. It turns out that the waste—paper, rags, plastic, etc.—in Delhi produces only about half the caloric value of a Western city. This contrast tells us a lot about the treatment of waste in rich and...