Reduce, Reuse, Reconsider

We're another week closer to Earth Day (4/22) and our environmental book give-away contest (check back on 4/18 for entry details!). Today's facts are from Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States by Samantha MacBride. Recycling Reconsidered tells how the success and popularity of recycling has diverted attention from the steep environmental costs of manufacturing the goods we consume and discard. Samantha MacBride teaches at Columbia University’s School of Public and International Affairs and is a professional in local waste governance.

 

• Bottles and jars that residents set out with their cans, plastics, and other recyclables rarely arrive at materials recovery facilities intact, but even those that do are sure to get broken as they proceed. As mixed recyclables move along a conveyor belt, a combination of magnets, electrical currents, air jets, and hand picking remove metal, plastic, and paper, leaving only glass. As glass is sifted out of the moving mix, it emerges crushed, mixed with food residues and bits of label. In this form, known as “dirty mixed cullet,” it is not good for much. At best, it can be used as low-grade fill or what is known as “alternative daily cover,” a substitute for the earthen layer that must cover each day’s load of trash at the landfill. If it is going to become anything more, it has to be shipped to a beneficiation facility to get cleaned and color sorted.

 

• Between 1970 and 1980, municipal solid waste generation in the United States had grown from 3.3 to 3.6 pounds per capita per day. By 1986, residents and businesses were throwing away 4.3 pounds a day. 

 

• Recycling rates commonly quoted are deceptive, since they usually are for municipal solid wastes only. Although many American communities are now recycling 25 to 50 percent of the trash they collect, other kinds of wastes are recycled much less and are produced in greater quantities. All told, an estimated 23 billion tons of waste (excluding water) are produced in the United States each year. Of this, less than 2 percent is actually recycled, most of it paper, glass, and metals.
  --- (Quoted from INFORM’s Entended Producer Responsibility: A Materials Policy for the 21^st Century).

 

• If you live in North America, you have probably seen code numbers stamped on the bottom of plastic bottles, tubs, trays, and even some plastic bags, surrounded by the three chasing arrows that since 1970 have symbolized recycling. Although consumers widely construe these code numbers, which run from one to seven, as instructions to recycle the item in question, the numbers are, in the words of the plastics industry itself, “not intended to be-–nor ever promoted as-–a guarantee to consumers that a given item bearing the code will be accepted for recycling in their community.”

 

• At the end of the 2000s, almost 60 proposals exist to ban, assess fees on, or require in-store recycling collection of plastic bags active in states and a few localities across the United States. In some states where in-store recycling, mandatory or otherwise, has been implemented, such as Delaware, Rhode Island, and New York, no program meets the criteria of strong extended producer responsibility to require producers to document baseline quantities generated and quantities diverted and to achieve mandatory targets for recycling.

 

Comments

[anne mcelhinney]

just started this book. still in the intro and was moved enough to look up the author. so precise, clear, and unpretentious to start with.
already my lazy, fairly unexamined loyalties to recycling have been rocked. though, as a solo individual i'm curious as to my part now.
thanks