The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [158]
The jury is still out on whether bioplastics could be made in a truly sustainable way that supports a reduction in packaging and avoids single-use packaging completely; that supports small farmers and farmworkers; that adheres to the principles of green chemistry; and that avoids fossil fuel use. There’s a great group called the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative that’s working on this very issue.
Also, much of our waste collected for recycling is exported overseas, especially to Asia, where environmental and worker safety laws are weaker and less well enforced. I’ve tracked plastic waste, used car batteries, e-waste, and other toxic-containing components of our municipal waste to Bangladesh, India, China, Indonesia, and other places. I’ve snuck into facilities (in various disguises!) to get a firsthand look at what happens to our waste overseas. The awful conditions I witnessed are not what conscientious individuals in the United States have in mind when they diligently wash out their plastic bottles or return their used car batteries.
Another complaint about recycling is that it often isn’t even recycling but is actually something called downcycling. True recycling achieves a circular closed loop production process (a bottle into a bottle into a bottle), while downcycling just makes Stuff into a lower-grade material and a secondary product (a plastic jug into carpet backing). At best, downcycling reduces the need for virgin ingredients for the secondary item, but it never reduces the resources needed to make a replacement for the original item. In fact, by being able to advertise a product as “recyclable,” the demand for that first item may actually rise, which, ironically, is more of a resource drain.
The classic example of this is plastic—where the industry cleverly appropriated the popular “chasing arrows” recycling logo and added to it the numbers 1 to 9 to indicate the grade of plastic. As Heather Rogers points out in Gone Tomorrow, this “misleadingly telegraphed to the voting consumer that these containers were recyclable and perhaps had even been manufactured with reprocessed materials.”131 For the record, it is extremely difficult to actually recycle plastics; almost always, they are downcycled. If you’re curious, ask your local recycler what it is doing with those bottles it picks up—are they being made into new bottles or shipped off to China, where they’re turned into some secondary product?
Dr. Paul Connett says that “recycling is an admission of defeat; an admission that we were not clever enough or didn’t care enough to design it to be more durable, to repair it, or to avoid using it in the first place.”132 It’s not that recycling itself is bad, but our overemphasis on it is a problem. There is a reason recycling comes third in the eco mantra “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” Recycling is the last thing we should do with our Stuff, not the first. As a last resort, recycling is better than landfill or incineration for sure. And hats off to those dedicated people who have built and voraciously defended the recycling infrastructure that does exist in this country. Let’s use that infrastructure when our backs are against the wall, when we’re out of better options and have to chuck something.
Unfortunately though, recycling is most often not seen as a last resort, but as the primary environmental duty of an engaged citizen. It’s the number-one way people demonstrate their environmental commitment. In fact, more people recycle than vote regularly in this country! I can’t tell you how many times, when I get asked what I do for a living, people respond with a proud, “Oh, I recycle!” And while it’s good that they do, there must be greater awareness of the limitations of recycling, as well as widespread understanding of the other