Why Keep Recycling?
By: Virginia Head
Tags: Climate Change, Recycling, Waste, System Change

For many, many years, the fossil fuel industry has sold the American people a beautiful and horrible lie — recycling. It’s ok that you’re using more plastic than ever, because it’s recyclable! It can all be recycled. Just put it into a blue bin, and someone is going to come and take care of it, and take it to its new, beautiful home, and you can just keep consuming whatever you like with impunity. I’m sorry to say, that I have some bad news for you. This dream of recycling is, in fact, deeply faulty.

Source: One Green Planet

The facts are these:

In 2018, only 8.66% of plastic generated actually got recycled, according to the EPA, and only 32% of all waste was in fact recycled.

Meanwhile waste continues to increase — more plastics are produced every day, and with nowhere to put them except in a landfill, which has serious consequences for climate change.

According to a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, plastic production and disposal resulted in 850 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 and may be responsible for up to 2.8 billion tons by 2050. To give you some perspective, a 2000 mile flight round trip emits about 1.53 tons of emissions — so it’s not a small amount.

Our waste doesn’t just have an impact on soil, water, ocean and lake life, and the general functioning of our lives, but it is actually killing us, and our planet. Essentially, after all the decades of media around how great recycling is, and how wonderful it is for our planet, it’s actually a huge lie. Not only is it causing problems, but towns and cities simply cannot manage to process the amount of waste that we create, and have little incentive to do so with such a small market for recyclables.

Until last year, a lot of our recyclables in the U.S. were bought by China, and shipped there for them to do something with, and now we have no idea what to do with them. One of the first steps is actually collecting and properly sorting our recyclables, and to me that means having a federal standard of waste management. Considering that each municipality has their own rules, it makes it extraordinarily difficult to solve the biggest problem to recycling — contamination.

Source: Rolling Stone

In most waste systems, when an item is placed into a recycle bin (usually blue — not always) but the city actually doesn’t process this item as part of their recycling then the entire bin does not get recycled. Why? Recycling essentially means taking old material, chomping it down, and selling it as new source material, so that something can be made from it. Plastic bags become park benches, water bottles become jeans, etc etc. If contamination occurs in this process, it decreases the quality of the new source material that the city is trying to sell, and compromises the whole operation. Therefore, if styrofoam gets into a blue bin (a pretty universal no-no so please stop doing it), then that whole bin goes boom right into a landfill, where it contributes to the aforementioned emissions. Having a federal set of rules that were not only established, but promoted, taught, and basically known everywhere would do a lot to help this.

But education and a single standard can’t be the only things — we need the services to back them up. This is where I believe that something called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) comes in. While there are a lot of different ways to go about it — it may even be covered in a future post — I believe that by charging the biggest polluters, such as beverage companies, for their waste, then funds can be found to establish waste management systems that work better. This also can fund another essential part of the process — innovation.

Innovation is key, as there are new technologies being developed all the time that can advance recycling processes and create a better end product, and thus a better fresh source product, making the results of recycling more marketable. If these innovations are adopted federally, with one set of standards that everyone can hold to, then we might have a fighting chance at a recycling system that functions like it’s supposed to.

So with all of this going on — why recycle? First of all, you never know — it absolutely could get recycled. Even today, those items that you are setting aside may be a part of the 32% that gets recycled, and if you immediately put them in the trash, they definitely will not be. Also, things are changing! As more and more attention is put on the faults of recycling, hopefully it will improve. States like Maine are passing EPR laws, and other states are starting to follow suit. So keep trying, and keep advocating! Talk to your alderman, your representatives, talk to the people at your city, and find out what is going on there. And of course, keep recycling — you never know!!