Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [54]
Well, think again.
One night, coming home late from work, I witnessed the garbage men tossing those earnestly clear blue garbage bags full of glass into their truck’s crusher along with all the other garbage. I asked the guy who works in our building if that was normal.
“They got a lot of garbage to pick up,” he said. “Sometimes they don’t have time to separate everything.”
I wondered if this was just an anomaly—or the norm. Here’s a few things I found out:
In the mid-1990s, Indian environmental activists discovered that Pepsi was creating a complicated waste disposal problem in their country. Used plastic from Pepsi bottles turned in for recycling in the United States was being shipped over to India to be recycled back into Pepsi bottles or other plastic containers. But the senior manager of the Futura Industry factory outside of Madras, where most of the waste was being dumped, admitted that much of it was never actually recycled. To make matters worse, at around the same time the truth about the recycling was revealed, the company announced that it was going to open a company in India that would manufacture—of course—single use disposable bottles for export to the United States and Europe, leaving toxic byproducts behind in India. So while India has been bearing the environmental and health burdens, consumers in industrialized countries continue using plastic products without suffering any of the drawbacks. And all the while we consumers cruise blissfully along, confident that we’re improving the environment by “recycling.”
In another instance, a magazine in San Francisco contracted with a paper recycler to pick up all its white waste paper each month. When one employee followed the trash out the door one day, he saw that the paper intended for recycling was being tossed in with the discarded McDonald’s wrappers and Starbucks cups. When confronted about it, the waste recycling company denied it.
In 1999 an investigation of what happens to all the waste created by Congress (insert your own joke here) discovered that 71 percent of the 2,670 tons of paper used that year by the legislative branch was not recycled because it had been mixed in with food waste and other nonrecyclable materials. That same year up to 5,000 tons of glass bottles, aluminum cans, cardboard, and other recyclable waste on Capitol Hill was simply dumped in a landfill, no questions asked. Had Congress properly recycled these products, it could have saved taxpayers up to $700,000.
In instance after instance, I found the same thing. No real recycling was taking place. We were being conned.
So I stopped recycling. I came to the conclusion that when I recycled, what I was really doing was letting myself off the hook. As long as I did my little paper-glass-metal separation duty, I wasn’t required to do anything else to save Planet Earth. Once my bottles and cans and newspapers were deposited in the appropriately colored barrels, I could press reset on my conscience and trust that someone else would do the rest of the job. Out of sight, out of mind, back inside my gas-guzzling minivan.
Yes, I have a minivan. It gets about 15 miles a gallon, about 7 less than what the sticker said. I love this minivan. It’s roomy, has a smooth ride, and sits a foot above the cars in front of me so I can see everything.
I know some people say we Americans are spoiled by our low prices at the gas pump compared with the rest of the world, which pays up to three times what we pay. But hey, this ain’t Belgium, where you can drive across the entire country in something like thirty-five minutes. We live in a huge nation. We need to get around! We’ve got places to go, things to do. The rest of the world needs to understand that they benefit from our ability to get from Point A to Point B.