The Recycling Betrayal

There was this hopeful moment--beginning in the 70s and sweeping through the 80s--that Americans not only recognized the damage and the danger, but were willing to do something about it.

The waste that was piling up and poisoning the future was the country's latest harvest of shame.  Environmentalists preached the solution, and, beginning small but soon reaching big cities across the country, recycling became a part of civic and family life.

Techniques were created to recycle paper and cardboard, glass and certain metals and plastics, so they weren't piling up for centuries at the edge of town.  I remember when recycling was about to come to the city of Pittsburgh, and one of the local papers scoffed.  This was the throwaway society, it would never work.

 I wrote an oped that said: but it will, if for no other reason than recycling revives an ethic common to my grandparents and parents generations of working people, especially recent immigrants.  It was thrift and avoiding waste.  Recycling and reusing was simply part of life in the 1930s, and it was patriotic duty in the war years of the 1940s.

When the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania wanted to promote recycling, I proposed a Pennsylvanian's slogan from the 18th century: Waste not, want not.  In the end, it's the same idea.

People did recycle in Pittsburgh, and though it has taken longer in some places, it's now pretty standard.   Except that the whole idea is being betrayed.

When we arrived in Arcata in the 90s, we separated recyclables and hauled them to the recycling center, where I placed them in the proper bins.  A few cars might be lined up at the entrance, but the exercise wasn't bad and you saw people you knew, you met people, you recycled together--it was a community thing.  And if you wanted, afterwards you could park and browse for recycled hardware, and later a kind of thrift shop was added.  There were even piles of books that weren't deemed saleable, free for a period before they got pulped.  This was instant recycling.

You could get a little money back for recycling cans and bottles and a few other things, but basically, you were doing your duty to the environment, the future, and for the health of the community.

Then, like big cities, Arcata got curbside recycling, handled by the same company that handled the garbage. Now you not only didn't get any cash, you pay a monthly fee, which is pretty much mandatory.  The recycling centers soon closed, which made it harder to recycle things like batteries and other material not suitable for the recycling bins--paper, glass, certain plastics and metals.

That was the start. Recycling became a for-fee business.  I really began to smell a rat when the garbage company announced "single stream recycling."  That was so clearly bullshit that I wonder anybody bought into it at all.  Single stream recycling is just three words for one, which is "garbage."

Now we're learning just what bullshit this is.  Once recycling was a matter of business rather than environmental responsibility, it turns out "recycling" meant: send it all to China.

Not my idea of recycling.  And now China doesn't want the stuff.

So what happens?  In some communities, the garbage companies are a little too obvious.  They're burning it, sending toxic fumes into neighborhoods.

Recycling is therefore just about over. Plenty of pretty logos and slogans, but essentially it seems to be dying if not dead already, surviving as a still profitable scam. We're just putting trash into two containers instead of one.

There are at least two reasons for all of this.

The first is that somebody decided that recycling had to be a profit-making business, and when it was no longer profitable, it couldn't be done.  Who decided that?  The cost of recycling should be part of the cost of the packaging we use--it's all the same process, and the same product.  Recycling is a public good and should be subsidized when prices are down.

The second is that recycling was not supposed to be a single solution, let alone the only solution.  The mantra originally was "Reduce, reuse, recycle."  But apart from some efforts on plastic bags and straws, we didn't reduce waste, and we don't reuse as much as we could.  Recycle is the third option, and even when it works, it can't do it alone.

We lost the reason why we need to recycle.  In the 80s and 90s in particular, people were aware that they needed to buy recycled products if recycling was going to work.  Grocery stores and big boxes like Costco sold recycled paper products (toilet paper, paper towels) in green packaging.  You can't find these at our Costco anymore.  Other places, including big box business supply stores, sold recycled printer paper, legal pads and so on.  They often had special sections with recycled products.  I haven't seen that for a decade or more.

These products were the bare minimum, the beginning.  Once recycled paper was available, there was no excuse, economic or otherwise, for cutting down trees to make toilet paper.  But we never moved forward, developing new products for the mass market, or at least non-rich consumers. And now we've retreated.

Actual effort should be made, and actual money spent, to promote recycled products.  Any business trying to create a market does that, but more to the point, the public needs to know why recycling and recycled products are important.

Clearly recycling wasn't doing the entire job--immense quantities of plastics and other trash made their way into the oceans and into the ground.  But instead of expanding the reach of recycling--into textiles for instance--and researching new ways to recycle plastics and so on, we just dropped the ball.  Seduced by seeming convenience, we left it up to monopoly businesses.

To me the most horrifying fact I've read that was revealed in David Wallace-Wells' new book about the climate crisis is that (in the words I quoted from the Guardian summary) "we've done more damage to the environment since...1992 than we did in all the millennia that preceded it."

It was one thing to be ruining the life of the planet unknowingly.  It's quite another to have once recognized it, actually devised something like a solution, and then never done it, or stopped short of doing it right.

 Meanwhile, populations have grown, consumption has grown, life in the deepest and most remote areas of the oceans is choking on plastic while huge expanses of waste the size of states poison the seas.

We have no excuses anymore.  If this makes you feel guilty, too bad.  We are guilty.