This paper estimates the social cost of municipal waste management as a function of the recycling rate. The social costs of waste management include all municipal costs and revenues, costs to recycling households to prepare materials, external disposal costs at the landfill or incinerator, and external benefits of recycling attributed to more environmentally efficient production processes. Results suggest the recycling rate that minimizes these social costs is 18%. This result is rather robust to changes in household recycling costs and external disposal costs but is sensitive to changes in the assumed external benefits of recycling. Based upon the main result of this paper, many developed countries may be recycling too much municipal solid waste 

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