Franklin and other researchers have concluded that recycling does at least save energy -- the extra fuel burned while picking up recyclables is more than offset by the energy savings from manufacturing less virgin paper, glass and metal. "The net result of recycling is lower energy consumption and lower releases of air and water pollutants," says Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, which has calculated the ecological benefits of recycling. But there are much more direct -- and cheaper -- ways to reduce pollution. Recycling is a messy way to try to help the environment. Consider a few questions whose answers would seem obvious to the environmentally aware:

Does a 5-cent deposit on a soft-drink can help the environment? Mandatory deposits encourage recycling and reduce litter, but these programs typically spend $500 for every ton of cans and bottles collected, which makes curbside recycling look like a bargain. States without mandatory deposits -- like Texas and Washington -- have proven that the most efficient way to reduce litter is to hire clean-up crews, which pick up a lot more than just bottles and cans. Recycling takes money that could be used for other clean-up efforts: when New York's Sanitation Department started its recycling program, it cut back on street cleaning.

Are reusable cups and plates better than disposables? A ceramic mug may seem a more virtuous choice than a cup made of polystyrene, the foam banned by ecologically conscious local governments. But it takes much more energy to manufacture the mug, and then each washing consumes more energy (not to mention water). According to calculations by Martin Hocking, a chemist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, you would have to use the mug 1,000 times before its energy-consumption-per-use is equal to the cup. (If the mug breaks after your 900th coffee, you would have been better off using 900 polystyrene cups.) A more immediate environmental impact has been demonstrated by studies in restaurants: the average number of bacterial organisms on reusable cups, plates and flatware is 200 times greater than on disposable ones.

Should you recycle today's newspaper? Saving a tree is a mixed blessing. When there's less demand for virgin wood pulp, timber companies are likely to sell some of their tree farms -- maybe to condominium developers. Less virgin pulp means less pollution at paper mills in timber country, but recycling operations create pollution in areas where more people are affected: fumes and noise from collection trucks, solid waste and sludge from the mills that remove ink and turn the paper into pulp. Recycling newsprint actually creates more water pollution than making new paper: for each ton of recycled newsprint that's produced, an extra 5,000 gallons of waste water are discharged.

Cost-benefit analyses for individual products become so confusing that even ardent environmentalists give up. After years of studies and debates about the environmental merits of cloth versus disposable diapers, some environmental organizations finally decided they couldn't decide; parents were advised to choose whichever they wanted. This sensible advice ought to be extended to other products. It would not only make life simpler for everyone, but would probably benefit the environment. When consumers follow their preferences, they are guided by the simplest, and often the best, measure of a product's environmental impact: its price.

Polystyrene cups are cheap because they require so little energy and material to manufacture -- without reading a chemist's analysis, you could deduce from the cup's low price that it's an efficient use of natural resources. Similarly, the prices paid for scrap materials are a measure of their environmental value as recyclables. Scrap aluminum fetches a high price because recycling it consumes so much less energy than manufacturing new aluminum. The low price paid for scrap tinted glass tells you that you won't be conserving valuable resources by recycling it. While price is hardly a perfect measure of environmental impact, especially in countries where manufacturers are free to pollute, an American product's price usually reflects the cost of complying with strict environmental regulations. It's generally a more reliable guide than intuitive moral judgments or abstract theories about what's good for the planet.

A theorist could logically argue that you have an obligation to recycle not just the paper in this magazine but also the staples. As a nonrenewable resource, isn't the steel theoretically even more precious than the paper? Shouldn't you take each staple to a scrap-metal dealer or, better yet, reuse it in your own stapler? But if you look at the low price of new staples -- and the fact that scrap dealers aren't scurrying to buy used staples -- you can see that it's a waste of time to worry about posterity running out of staples. Recycling devotees have too often ignored such signals, preferring programs based on rules instead of prices, and they've hurt their own cause. They've missed the obvious solution to America's garbage problems -- a solution they should have recognized from one of their seminal ecological texts.

The Tragedy Of the Dump

THE PHILOSOPHICAL underpinning of the modern environmental movement can be found in "The Tragedy of the Commons," a 1968 essay by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. It is a parable about a village's public pasture, the commons, that is open free of charge to everyone's cattle. Because no villager has a personal incentive to restrict the size of his herd, the herds keep growing, and eventually their overgrazing destroys the commons. The parable is a useful model for the many environmental problems in which the common good is damaged by individuals acting out of rational self-interest (like overfishing of the oceans or pollution of the atmosphere). It applies nicely to the garbage situation in the many communities where a free town dump has historically been treated as a commons.