Why Not Just Recycle?

We have passed the halfway mark of our experiment, and my blog entries have slowed to a trickle because we've stopped encountering fresh difficulties in our quest to eliminate most plastic from our lives. We've solved most of our day-to-day plastic problems and discovered most of our workarounds. It's time for me to begin addressing the larger issues surrounding the Experiment – the institutional and cultural changes needed to address the problem of plastic, and why they matter.

When Rick and I first started talking about doing this year of no plastics, a friend said to me, “Why not just recycle?” It's an excellent question, and emblematic, I think, of where we are as a society in our thinking about waste.

If environmental awareness is a spectrum, we've advanced, as a culture, some distance since the beginning of the throwaway culture. We're past, for example, those television ads of the 1950s that touted the advantages of newly-developed disposables by showing fishermen dropping empty beer cans into a lake.

In the 70s we were taught not to be litterbugs – not to fling our fast food bags out the car window, but to throw them away. But where is “away”? As a child I thought our cities simply built their landfills in places where there wasn't “anything else.” You see the problem with that idea.

Recycling came along about that time as well, and forward thinkers began to practice it, though it required extra time and attention to sort, clean and transport recyclables. Rick developed a reputation as a vigorous recycler more than thirty years ago. I started recycling with gusto in the early 90s.

At some point the bigger cities introduced curbside recycling, and every few years the system gets better: more products are accepted, a greater variety of materials can be co-mingled, recycle bins get bigger and garbage cans get smaller. Conscientious urban citizens recycle, feel good about themselves for doing so, and look with disdain on people who don't follow suit. So what's the problem? Here are a few considerations:

• Not everything that is recyclable is recycled. Manufacturers who use virgin plastic put recycle arrows on their products precisely because they want the public to perceive plastics as harmless. But the presence of the symbol on an item doesn't mean that the person who buys the thing has access to a facility that takes it – or has the patience to find out what can and can't be recycled and to do the right thing. Many communities still do not have even basic recycling facilities, and many others have no curbside pickup. Sometimes there are no facilities because recyclers can't compete with manufacturers who use virgin plastic. There has to be a market for recycled items in order to complete the loop.
• Recycling is not a waste-free process. It takes fossil fuels to transport recyclables and to run the machines that sort and remake the items. Recycling also requires inputs of fresh water.
• Plastic (unlike aluminum and glass) is only partially recyclable. It degrades in quality as it moves into its next life, and so each recycled plastic item must also contain some virgin plastic. Often the new items are not recycled, but rather downcycled into things like bumper stickers whose next stop will be the landfill.
• Many items that are destined for recycling don't make it through the process. They get lost en route; they're taken out of the mixture because they're too dirty; they get jammed in machines.
• A large percentage of our plastic recyclables (as well as paper) is shipped overseas, a process that requires stupidly huge amounts of fuel. Moreover, it is sometimes not “recycled” at all, but burned to generate electricity. Imagine the emissions from the smokestacks of unregulated electric companies burning plastic shopping bags in India and China, and the health impact on the people living there.

On the spectrum of practices representing degrees of environmental awareness, recycling falls some distance from the one end, where we find, say, Love Canal. But it also lies quite some distance from the other end, which represents sustainability. We are not going to be able to recycle our way out of our environmental problems, and those of us who do recycle should not feel too self-congratulatory about it.

Recycling is important and necessary, but only for those plastics that are unavoidable. For the others, a better practice is DON'T BRING THEM IN THE DOOR IN THE FIRST PLACE.