During a political science lecture in my first year at Mun, my prof asked our class a simple question: where does the food we eat come from? I found it fascinating that despite my own disposition to curiosity, I'd never given my food supply much thought. It's a luxury to live in a country where the word “famine” evokes images of a distant time and place, and where most of us hold the vague notion that our food comes from the back of the grocery store.
My prof was trying to make a point about the politics of food, but her question got me thinking about another system that's so entrenched in our world that many of us never question it – waste collection. I think most of us have some understanding of what a landfill looks like, whether thanks to the Discovery Channel or to the obnoxious proselytizers of the Gospel of Al Gore. Most of us care enough or have been nagged enough to invest a little time sorting out paper from plastic or rinsing out empties, so long as a big stinky truck shows up every week to haul it all away.
But what I didn't know – and what a whole lot of dedicated green freaks don't know either – is that just because you left it on the curb in a blue bin doesn't mean it's not headed for the landfill. Recycling is an industry, and like any industry, if there's no buyer for the product, then the product has no value. We have a word for things with no value – garbage.
Certain materials are much more amenable to the process of recycling than others. Aluminum cans, for example, are far easier to manufacture from post-consumer content, and because this process uses only 5% of the energy required to make new Aluminum, it's an attractive alternative for companies looking to cut costs.
Unfortunately, not all materials are like Aluminum. Often recycling processes actually use more energy than would be used to create the same product from new materials, trumping the benefit of reduced landfill space. Paper products can only be recycled two to three times before the raw material breaks down and is no longer usable. It has been demonstrated that, because tree farmers are required to plant more trees than they harvest, the use of recycled paper materials actually has a negative effect on tree populations.
Plastic, one of the most ubiquitous materials in our disposable world, is actually one of the least amenable to recycling. Plastics often need to be of nearly identical composition in order to mix properly. Biodegradable plastic is not recyclable, but is often mistakenly mixed with recyclable plastic, contaminating the material and making it ineligible for recycling.
My feeling is that we need to seriously reassess the practical value of our current recycling programs. For a lot of us, the blue-bin/green-bin system is the only alternative we are aware of. In St. John's we barely have a conventional recycling program to speak of; there's no city collection, so if you bother to recycle at all, that means weekly trips to the depot to drop off your paper and plastic.
So now before you throw up your hands in exasperation, let me present you with a third alternative. It's hardly new – in fact, it's probably something your grandmother has been doing for years. Wartime recycling aimed to conserve resources with massive, government-supported campaigns. There was no large-scale system for recycling – conservation was done on a human scale.
Wanna know the crazy part? It was really,
really effective.
Frankly, I think the current discourse on sustainability is way too focused on large-scale, systemic solutions. I don't know that sticking a few bins out on the curb next to a pile of garbage bags will make us more environmentally conscious. Sometimes it feels like environmentalists want to create some mass-produced cure for the problem of mass production. It's a dubious solution, and so far has had limited success.
Bringing recycling down to a human scale isn't only an effective way to approach sustainability, it's also a way for ordinary people to take ownership of a solution. Ordinary people, with ordinary lives, remaking, reusing, and repurposing ordinary things. On a human scale.
Sounds to me like a pretty extraordinary idea.
