RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE
So, let’s talk about recycling. Do you recycle? Of course you do, you're not some kind of barbarian!
When Vancouver first implemented its recycling program, several decades ago now, a campaign was launched to sell the idea to the public and to educate them. Even in primary school we were bombarded with messaging about the civic waste reduction strategy and of a larger movement involving municipalities everywhere. I remember continually being reminded of “the three Rs”. Teachers, principals, parents, as well as government, industry, and the media drove home daily the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra.
“The three Rs”, we were told, were ordered by their importance. First there was REDUCE: the fundamental element of any legitimate waste reduction plan. Reduction is, obviously, about taking a look at what you consume and finding ways to cut back – whether through buying products that use less or better packaging or simply buying less stuff altogether. (This step is the most meaningful and has the greatest impact.) Next comes REUSE: of the little that’s left after step one, reduce, you should be consuming products that allow you to reuse what remains after consumption – whether that’s turning a jam jar into a piggy bank or buying quality furniture that’s able to be refinished rather than needing to be tossed out. Last, and most certainly least of the triplet, is RECYCLE. The idea here being that once you’ve moved through the first two stages – you’ve trimmed away all the excess waste, the needless consumptive fat in your life, and reduced your consumption down to key items you simply cannot avoid buying; and reused all possible elements of what remains – what is left can be taken by the municipality and recycled.
If this were done, it would virtually eliminate the ever-growing garbage pile without having to incinerate or ship anything away, and thereby eliminate our habit of passing off our problems onto someone else. The idea is one of those rare gems that is both simple and quite nearly perfect. A waste reduction model such as this is really a for-profit, pro-business model that acknowledges that everything that’s disposed of is something that had to be produced and paid for. Eliminating such waste, therefore, is about efficiency and about making and saving more money and doing so in a much smarter way. Only, we’ve never done any of this in any serious way. (Surely you’ve noticed.) As a public we’ve never even pretended to reduce or reuse, and there’s been no meaningful push for industrial efficiency. Not in the least. In fact, to the contrary, our consumption and waste production has continually been on the increase. For instance, rather than imposing higher resource and utility costs on industry, thereby encouraging efficiency and limiting waste, we entice them with very cheap or even free resources and utilities, ensuring excess and waste. So I don’t think we can even pretend we’ve ever been serious about waste reduction.
And yet notice how we’ve wholeheartedly sunk our teeth into, of all things, recycling! There are ads across all media and in every form imploring (and even pointedly guilt-tripping) the citizenry into recycling. In Vancouver, more than most places, recycling is very serious civic commitment. In fact, Vancouver is the only place I’ve ever been in which you’re likely to get attacked or even publicly shamed for putting a #4 low-density polyethylene bottle in the wrong bin. It’s crazy.
So, what have we had to do to commit ourselves to this waste reductio– err, rather, recycling strategy? Well, in order to recycle, first we get everyone to sort out all their waste. Doing so requires every household in the city to acquire several different plastic bags and bins for separating out the different classes of recyclables. (And there are several different shapes and sizes of receptacle for different contexts.) Then we need a collection service: someone to come a get all of these recyclables. Of course the vehicles we employ are some of the largest and least efficient vehicles on the road; and, just to add to their inefficiency, these loud, disruptive, and expensive trucks run the exact same route and make all the exact same stops as the city’s garbage and yard waste trucks.
Then, once collected, all this material needs somewhere to go. For that we build large recycling facilities (typically occupying what was forest, agricultural, or park land) costing a great deal of money and resources to construct, operate, and maintain.
I hope you’ve noticed that we haven’t even done any recycling yet. All we’ve really managed to do so far, aside from giving everyone in town a new project, is buy a bunch of new stuff that we didn’t have or need prior. (So this was the opposite of reducing, and there was certainly no reusing or recycling involved in the building of our massive new recycling system. The whole program feels like much much more rather than a meaningful movement toward less; however, lets keep looking.)
Finally all our recyclables arrive at our sparkling new recycling depot and we can get down to the business of recycling. Here items are sorted before being shipped off to other facilities where they are further sorted, cleaned, crushed or shredded, and finally mechanically or chemically processed, and even reprocessed, back into base material. These constituents are then shipped off to others who can produce new materials from it.
It was hard work and it was costly but we’re stoked: we know that we’ve diverted all this stuff from the dump; and we know that from our recyclables a wide variety of new items can be produced. Pulp products can be re-pulped into new papers and packing materials; cans can be chipped up and melted into new cans; plastics can be melted down and formed into new containers or processed into countless new items like construction materials, furniture and counter tops, fibers and fleece for carpet and clothing and much more. It’s pretty exciting really.
But wait! With thirty years of recycling behind us shouldn’t our stores be overflowing with cheap, locally re-sourced, recycled products? Where are these items and why aren’t they virtually free? Sure, my newspapers and magazines are printed on 100% recycled material but they still cost the same as or more than they did ten years ago. And a bottle of Pepsi or a jug of milk hasn’t come down in price. What about that? After all, did I not purchase the original raw material, provide the labour to clean, sort, and divert it from the waste stream, and then pay municipal taxes for a truck to pick it all up and take it away? And didn’t we build the plant to store and processes this stuff and provide grants, tax incentives, and resources to support this utility and related industry? Why yes!
Well, as it turns out, recycling is an expensive, inefficient, dirty, and energy-intensive process. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, the cost to acquire recycled materials typically exceeds the cost of new raw materials, and often by a considerable amount. For example, they tell us that virgin plastics cost 40% less than recycled plastic; and that, while glass and aluminum are highly recyclable (nearly endlessly renewable and may be recycled with very high efficiency), most plastics – some of our most abundant and problematic materials – can be recycled one time only. So the benefits, if any, to the environment and to the public is really very slight. Well what about glass and aluminum then? Yes, it seems diverting these materials from the dump is a good idea and can have a real impact. Industry tells us that, since 2009, more than half of all aluminum cans produced were made from recycled aluminum, for instance. And yet, you’ll notice, almost all the costs associated with recycling is passed off to consumers while the benefits remain with producers.
In fact, many would go so far as to suggest that the meager benefits of recycling are easily nullified by the large amounts of energy consumed and pollution generated by recycling. When you add all of the elements of the recycling process to the mix (a million new plastic recycling bins, additional collection trucks and transport vehicles, recycling plants, bottle depots, and processing facilities...) the whole procedure starts to look, well, pretty crazy.
In fact, it couldn’t be more crazy. Recycling as it is feels something akin to fighting to prove your pacifism or fucking to retain your virginity. Well, isn’t it? Again, words have come to mean their opposite. Here we have reduction transmuted into INCREASED production and consumption; a project aimed at less, at eliminating waste, becomes a massive and ever-expanding industry surviving only on the production of a whole lot MORE waste. Isn’t it clear that, instead of a desire to eliminate excess and waste, we have actually created a desire to recycle? If you doubt this then I encourage you to walk down a suburban street on recycling day and avoid the feeling that the whole goal of recycling is to see who can put the largest bin of neatly sorted not-garbage out on the curb each week. It’s pure madness. You’ll see whole blue bins just rammed and overflowing with plastic water bottles, for example: something totally needless, virtually non-recyclable, that didn’t even exist before the recycling era... In this way, the cult of recycling, it would seem, made the plastic water bottle, and the huge and ever-growing mountain of waste that results, possible.
So if our aim is to keep the recycling man at his post then, by all means, continue; but if our waste reduction efforts come from more personal, social, or ecological concerns, and have something to do with waste reduction, then we really must put far less energy into worrying about what packaging goes into which bin and much more energy into focusing, seriously, as individuals and a society, on those two missing Rs.
Comments