The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [157]
At a recycling conference I attended recently, I learned about RecycleBank, a program that weighs residents’ recycling bins at the curb and awards people points for heavier bins. That means the neighbor who buys cases of single-serving bottled water gets points over the one who installed a filter and drinks tap water in reusable containers! But wait, there’s more. Guess what you get for those points? More Stuff! Residents cash in those points for goods at partner retailers including Target, IKEA, Foot Locker, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Who invented these programs—Keep America Beautiful?
Programs like this give recycling a bad name, by encouraging more consumption and more waste. They allow producers to escape responsibility for their wasteful packaging and, perversely, subsidize the generation of disposable Stuff. And perhaps worse of all, programs like this claim to be making real change.
The Ugly
Despite its rainbow-bright image, recycling is often a dirty process. If Stuff contains toxic components, then recycling perpetuates them, exposing recycling workers and yet another round of consumers and community residents to potential health threats. Even if the material isn’t toxic, large-scale municipal recycling requires trucks and factories that use a lot of energy and create more waste. Just because it’s called recycling doesn’t mean it’s green. As currently practiced, recycling is largely controlled by huge waste hauling companies like Waste Management, Inc., which operates facilities for both recycling and wasting (and whose profit is far higher for the wasting part).
BIOPLASTICS: AN OXYMORON OR A SIGN OF HOPE?
Currently most plastics are made from petroleum and a host of chemicals, many toxic. We have to figure out how to meet our needs using materials that are renewable, safe, and ecologically sound. So what about bioplastics?
There are two generations of contemporary bioplastics (I am not counting some of the early plastics that were made from plant material, like cellophane, which was originally made from cellulose from wood pulp). The first generation was what I call the Total Scam Round of Biodegradable Plastics and the second generation is what I call the Jury’s Still Out Round of Biodegradable Plastics.
Round One: By the late 1980s, garbage was on the alarmed American public’s radar screen. In response, Mobil Chemical Company, producer of Hefty brand plastic garbage bags, mixed cornstarch with petroleum plastic and declared its bags “biodegradable.” Mobil’s spokespeople actually admitted this was just a PR stunt, not any kind of substantive claim regarding biodegradability.129
Environmental groups, scientists, and even some state governments were outraged by Mobil’s absurd claim. Within a couple years, lawsuits filed by seven states, as well as an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), forced Mobil to drop its “biodegradable” label.130
Round Two: Today, many companies make and use plastics that are produced 100 percent from plants—corn, potatoes, agricultural waste. These bioplastics are being used in food packaging, water bottles, and even computers, cell phones, and some car parts. Are these new bioplastics truly sustainable? Or do they just reinforce our disposability culture and infrastructure?
Unfortunately, right now the crops that make up today’s bioplastics are mostly grown in huge centralized farms, with heavy inputs of pesticides and fossil fuels, using genetically modified organisms and poorly paid farmworkers. Some of them use food-grade crops that could be used, duh, for food, rather than the single-serving containers for which much bioplastic is utilized.
And even though they are technically compostable, that’s only in large-scale composting operations that reach the desired conditions for them to degrade. As an experiment, I put a bioplastic cup and some