The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [156]
Like many people, my earliest relationship with environmental causes was through recycling—starting in childhood. This was in the day prior to curbside recycling programs, so my mother had us kids collect our newspapers, bottles, and cans, pile them into the station wagon, and drive them up to the collection center at the local grocery store parking lot. I remember the heavy bundles and the rainbow paintings on the side of the storage sheds. I recall feeling good putting the bottles in the correct color-coded bins. I am not alone in having experienced that; around the world, many people recognize the good feeling that they get from recycling.
The feel-good aspect is at the heart of much of the debate about recycling. Is recycling a con that keeps us deluded into feeling like we’re helping the planet while leaving industry free to keep churning out ever more badly designed toxic Stuff? Heather Rogers, author of a book about garbage called Gone Tomorrow, writes that “industry accepted recycling in lieu of more radical changes like bans on certain materials and individual processes, production controls, minimum standards for product durability, and higher standards for resource extraction.”124
Or is recycling a good first step into broader awareness and activism on sustainability issues; a gateway experience to get people interested and then guide them along to taking more strategic and effective action? Neil Seldman, president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, who has chronicled recycling in the United States for three decades, says that recycling has the power to transform industry: “It may have to do with one of society’s most mundane problems, garbage, or discarded materials, but its implications go to the heart of our industrial system.”125
Actually, I believe it’s both. Recycling can lull us into believing we have done our part while nothing, really, has changed. And recycling can play an important role in the transformation to a more sustainable and more just economy.
The Good
In 2007—the most recent year for which data is available—people in the United States generated 254 million tons of trash, of which 85 million tons—or about a third—was recycled.126
The environmental benefits are obvious. Recycling keeps materials in use, thus reducing the demand for extracting and producing new materials and avoiding—or more likely delaying—the point at which the materials become waste. Reducing harvesting, mining, and hauling resources, as well as the production of new Stuff, can reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that even our meager 33.4 percent recycling rate in the United States results in an annual benefit of 193 million metric tons of CO2 reduction, which is equivalent to removing 35 million passenger vehicles from the road.127
And those CO2 reductions are just the start. Recycling also creates more jobs—and better ones—than other waste management options. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Washington, D.C., think tank specializing in waste and economic development, estimates that for every one hundred jobs created in recycling, just ten were lost in waste hauling.128
The Questionable
However, considering that it would be possible to make 100 percent of our Stuff so that it could be easily and safely reused, recycled, or composted, 33 percent is a pretty lame recycling rate. It’s especially alarming when we look at the data for waste generation. Yes, recycling is increasing, but so is total waste produced on both a national and per-capita level.
Our goal should not be to recycle more, but to waste less. Focusing on the wrong end of the question can point our efforts in the wrong direction. For example, I heard about a recycling contest in which a number of U.S. colleges participated to see who could collect the most plastic bottles to recycle. At one school,