the deal with recycling + why you should keep doing it

Babes and bots, 

It's come to my attention that my Colorado peers don't believe in recycling. In a quick poll of my closest companions, it just so happens that only my partner and my friend's nine-year-old daughter believe in recycling. I decided to do some research on the issue. Obviously, I have some strong opinions. 

what's the deal with recycling? 

Recycling is what we do with our plastics, paper, aluminum, glass, and cardboard products when we are done using them. Ideally, we are done using them when they no longer serve a purpose. Realistically, we are done using them when they have achieved but one of their potential tasks. Then, they go to a facility with huge machines that process our recycling and, ideally, turn it into something else. Recycling is the process by which waste is turned into usable material.

Take a yogurt cup, for example. When you've finished your yogurt, maybe you rinse it out diligently and place it in the recycling bin. Or perhaps you bring it to the elementary school art teacher to use for painting. Or perhaps you throw it out because it's late, you don't have time to rinse out your yogurt, or the city you live in doesn't take recycling. But what if, instead, you poked holes in the bottom and used it for plant starters at the end of Winter? What if you used the yogurt cup for an art project? 

The problem is that many people don't have time or space to repurpose their waste. Too many yogurt cups were collected with not enough plants or soil to fill them, or maybe Spring has sprung already. What's more? Many people don't consider it. The problem is that convenience is valuable, and sometimes you have no time left in your bank to spend. 

So whether it starts in your trash bin or eventually ends up there, all that stuff that isn't recyclable goes to dumps or incineration facilities. According to The Guardian, incineration facilities are preferable to dumps that leeche toxic chemicals and methane into the atmosphere. Sometimes, the dump will call it "waste-to-energy." This is also incineration, except they collect the smokey stuff (gas, methane, toxic off-gassing, etc.) and use it to A) power the plant, or B) heat our cities. The choices with non-recycled trash are: dump, incineration, or bury. It seems to me that any amount of waste diverted from those options is moving us in a positive direction. Think big, people. Think concept. 

The Guardian also reported that, in the U.S., only about 25% of household waste is placed into the recycling bin. That is not to be confused with the number of items that are actually recycled. Why? Because people don't know how, don't read the rules, don't care enough to do it properly, or are mistaken in their certainties that one thing may be recycled while another can't. Furthermore, recycling is different in every city. The list of items a city's recycling facilities do or don't take usually, but not always, corresponds with the items they make a profit from or, at the very least, actually recycle. So for those of you haters out there who think recycling is fake: YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM. Don't want to spend your time doing something you aren't sure works? Then do it the right way. 

The general rule for recycling is that your waste needs to be simple and clean. No oily cardboard, no papers coated in plastics or wax, no dirty food containers, no sequined craft projects. Tape and staples are fine, and sticky notes are generally okay but check with your city's facilities as sometimes small paper is not accepted (this information is widely available online with the search terms: "recycling guidelines [enter your city here]"). Sometimes, it matters if you rinse your plastics out, other times it doesn't. Generally, cities with big recycling programs will try and make recycling as accessible and easy as possible. They might not ask that your waste be clean or dry because it's too much work on consumers, or perhaps it doesn't actually matter. The waste is placed in a massive bath to get washed anyway, right? While that's true, what doesn't come out clean in the bin is wasted. When in doubt, rinse it out. 

can plastic be recycled?

Yes. But it's expensive and, since 2018 when China stopped taking the majority of plastics in the U.S., plastic recycling has been less profitable. Most plastics degrade over time, leaving little babies behind. As the logic goes, the older the plastic, the more babies. Of course, it's also a bit more complicated. Number 5 plastics, for example, are said to be sturdier and better for repurposing. NPR reported that, of the 52% of recycling facilities that take number 5 plastics, less than 5% of those facilities actually recycle them. The rest are diverted to a landfill, crunched together in massive cubes Wall-E-style, and stacked for disposal. While the numbers I've found differ, only about 5-25% of plastic in recycling bins is repurposed (so says this source, and this one, and this one, and this one). 

if our waste IS recycled, what happens next? where does it go?

Each category of recycling has a different process, but this Utah recycling website has a pretty basic idea. Cardboard is usually ground up into a pulp and turned into more paper products. Aluminum is great, never loses its quality, and requires just 5% of the energy to recycle as it did to generate the material. Aluminum is melted and turned into bicycle or airplane parts, new cans, foil, etc. Glass is similar, in that it never loses its quality. Glass gets crushed, processed, and turned into countertops, cups, sewer pipes, and more, sometimes as quick as 30 days. Magazine and printer paper products are turned into things like phonebooks, newspapers, toilet paper, or disposable napkins. And then there is plastic. Plastic, if taken, gets processed into all kinds of new materials. In fact, plastic is probably the most versatile waste product. That is, if it's recycled. In many cases, it's cheaper to burn the plastic than turn it into clothing, boats, playgrounds, building bricks, crude oil, or other sellable items. 

Where does all this processing happen? Sometimes, it happens here. Most of the time, our waste goes to Thailand, Malaysia, or India. There, it is bought and used as material. But if those countries say no, then it goes into the ocean or is dumped illegally someplace precious. That waste is so seldom stored in the Global North because it is aesthetically displeasing. So have you seen those evil pictures circulated by UNICEF of kids in Egypt wading through fields of trash? That's YOUR trash. YOU are the entitled CEO who pays someone else to cover up their problems. 

Where I live, our waste is brought to a dump. The problem, though, is that the dump reached capacity this year so now the city's trash collection services have to bring our waste to a different dump further away until they can build a new dump that meets our growing needs. Every city is indeed different. In Lubbock, Texas, for example, there is no recycling facility period.   

but still, if I have no guarantee that my labor produced anything, why should I continue to try? 

Capitalism, baby. Profit margins. We could say a lot about putting our money where our mouth is, and we could toot the swimwear-made-of-fishnets horn. But we could also just reduce the amount of unusable recycling that enters recycling facilities by listening to our city's guidelines and recycling properly. If we do it the way we are asked, we can reduce the back and forth between facilities which reduces our emissions overall. In addition to all that, MIT Technology Review also has some words for us: 

The solution to that problem lies further upstream: to address plastic pollution, those who produce plastics need to pay for the damage it causes, and the world will also have to make less of it. We’ll have to develop better, more recyclable products. We’ll also have to find sustainable alternatives and increase what ecologists call circularity—keeping those products in use as long as possible and finding ways to reuse their materials after that.

 

The mindset matters just like what you say matters, what you do matters, what you believe matters, and how you act matters. When you say no one is actually recycling anyway, you are also saying I don't want to work hard to do something that may or may not have a positive effect or, you're admitting that you're too busy or bored to look at the guidelines. And if you were to think of everything you do in your life as something that may or may not have a positive effect, you might as well say no to doing anything at all. 

Do you donate? Do you bring your clothes to the thrift store? Do you bring food to your neighbors or loved ones when they are sick, or grieving, or in need? Do you sometimes buy coffee for the person behind you in line? What if recycling were like that? You have no way of knowing for sure if your waste is repurposed unless you're doing it yourself, just like you have no way of knowing how much that person behind you will order, or if the neighbor will actually eat your food. But hopefully, you do know that good things happen on occasion because you've been on the receiving end of them. 

To recycle is to say you care about where your waste goes, it is to say you think about someone other than yourself and your immediate surroundings, it is to say you are mindful of your footprint in a settler-colonial state in which your garbage is aesthetically displeasing and, therefore, goes someplace else. 

Recycling is a lot bigger than you think. So before you choose to shirk responsibility for the bed you made, you might as well think about who is sleeping in it. 

Alright. That's all for now! Thanks for taking a bite out of the sandwich with me. 

XX BLT