Red, Green & Blue: Is Recycling as Virtuous as We Believe?
I admit it: I feel virtuous when I drop off a few bags of glass bottles and aluminum cans in the county recycling bin (we don’t have curbside recycling where I live) or stuff a few months’ worth of plastic shopping bags into the big cardboard bag collection bin at Walmart (though, yes, I feel less virtuous when I shop at Walmart). But there’s always a nagging doubt: is recycling really as beneficial as some of us believe?
A few minutes spent Googling "myths of recycling" leaves the picture even fuzzier: yes, recycling can be worthwhile … if local trash tipping fees are high, or if you’re recycling the right things, or if your city collects both trash and recyclables at once for sorting at a centralized facility, or, or, or … All of which leads me to believe that the truly virtuous don’t recycle so much as they reduce and reuse. That is, don’t buy the plastic-wrapped foam tray of tomatoes when you can choose the loose variety. Don’t buy bottled water when you can fill a reusable container with tap or filtered water at home. Don’t buy plastic food storage containers when you can reuse empty yogurt or butter tins.
Of course, that doesn’t help me at the grocery store. Unless I make a special drive to the food co-op, where they let me reuse the plastic containers for honey or fresh-made peanut butter, I can’t reuse any food containers at the grocery store. I’d love to see the U.S. or individual states adopt a system more like that in many European countries, where most beverage containers are required to be refillable (Denmark boasts a compliance rate of 98 percent!). I believe that approach, coupled with a shift to pay-as-you-throw trash programs, would help us reduce waste and save both energy and resources better than a recycling-only strategy.
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Tags: deposit, garbage, Home and Garden, pas-as-you-throw, recycling, Red, Green and Blue, reduce, refillable, reuse, trash, waste
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September 4th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Hey Shirley… I think you may have touched on something upon which we can really agree.
As for recycling, my city has garbage pickup weekly and recycle (cans and paper) monthly. Before the recycling started I was frustrated because we were overflowing our regular garbage container. After recycling our regular container never fills up and we have at least a full container of recycle every month.
I do like your point about making buying decisions to limit waste. That’s what we call the TQM approach in business… Total Quality Management and one of the precepts is that you think outside the box to solve the problem before it happens. One example is a manufacturing company I worked with. They kept having a problem with their assembly process causing scratches on the finished appliances. They worked and worked on their assembly line processes to no avail until someone came up with the simple idea of a scratch resistant surface. Problem solved! Higher quality product without all the unnecessary after-the-fact controls.
I’m not as practiced at it as you are but I do try to buy my Gatorade and lemonade in powered form… and drink iced tea or tap water instead of bottled soft-drinks and water. And a big benefit is you don’t have to haul all of that waste and water in and out of your home.
It’s a really good premise that I wish everyone would put more thought into.
I’d love to hear some suggestions from the readers about what they do to minimize waste on the consumer purchase end.
September 4th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
A big construction conglomerate I have worked with established a policy for reducing construction waste by not allowing excess packaging onto the job site. (I think this has only been carried out in some of their European projects; it wasn’t in force on the projects I was involved with them on.) The philosophy is, "If it isn’t going into the building, it doesn’t belong on the site."
I think that this needs to be applied judiciously. There certainly are materials that need to be protected until they are installed (light fixtures are the first thing that springs to mind).
I don’t think this can be applied 100 percent, but it’s a mindset that helps to reduce construction waste, which is a huge impact on the waste stream.
September 4th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Another thing I’ve found that makes a big difference is composting fruit and vegetable waste, coffee grounds and laundry lint. Before I started, it didn’t seem like it would make that big a difference, but I really noticed the amount of garbage I produced each day going down significantly. (I think there’s a stat that says the average American produces about 7 pounds of compostable kitchen waste per day.)
Composting is one thing I’ve found that definitely makes me feel good, better even than recycling. Not only does it reduce the amount of garbage I throw out, but it feeds the soil in my backyard without chemicals or stuff that doesn’t belong there. An added benefit: some of those old avocado pits I’ve tossed onto the compost heap have sprouted into good-sized avocado saplings. What beats turning kitchen waste into fresh, home-grown avocadoes?
September 4th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
One thing my husband and I have been trying to do is not succumb to the temptation of row upon row of shiny, cold beverages at the convenience store. Otherwise, we end up with a plethora of Gatorade bottles. We substitute our bev cravings by filling up Nalgenes at the fountain. We’ve never had a problem–save a few weird looks when we were in rural Iowa.
That, and buying draft beer at the bar instead of bottled.
September 5th, 2007 at 4:04 am
In California, they have had a mandate that 50% of all waste must be diverted from the landfill for several years now. Where I live locally, they implemented curb-side recycling for residential customer to achieve this. It works. 55% of all landfill waste is diverted. We can recycle any plastic #1-7, paper, cans, bottles, and most anything you can think of that is recyclable. Since plastic doesn’t recycle as well as say metals or glass and isn’t biodegradable like cardboard and newspaper, we strive to purchase things that are not in plastic. It works since we don’t have young kids. But even then we recycle everything.
When they come to pick up my bins they find our recyclable bin full and our “trash” bin with about 30 pounds or less worth stuff in it. Our kitchen trash can is a 3 gallon trash can that most people have in their bathroom and it gets emptied 3 times a week. The bathroom trash cans could get emptied once a month if we waited that long. And this is a family of 5.
Reusing is key to this though. We reuse bags, clothe napkins (washcloths actually), no plastic or paper dishes or utensils and much more.
Now if I could finish getting other areas of our life as green as this.
September 5th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Wow… these are inspirational. It’s these small day by day contributions that really make a difference. That’s what we should continue to encourage others to do by example.
Any more ideas come to mind?
September 5th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
I like your and your husband’s approach to beverages, Kelli (and draft beer usually tastes better anyway!).
Two more things I’ve found are helpful:
One, the more I’ve read about our food supply, the less interested I’ve become in buying processed foods of most kinds. Simply stocking your fridge with fresh fruits and vegetables, and buying things like grains and pasta in bulk at a co-op, can eliminate large amounts of packaging, boxes, plastic trays, etc. from your trash.
Two, after I made a conscious decision last year to eliminate paper towels from my life as much as possible, I was surprised to see how really easy it was. I’ve got a big supply of cloth dish towels and washcloths in my kitchen drawer, and it’s become second-nature to me now to attack spills and cleanup jobs with those instead of paper towels, then throw them into the wash machine to wait for the next load of laundry. Voila, I now probably use a single roll of (recycled paper) paper towels per month (mostly for bird-cage cleanup and the occasional squashed bug).
September 5th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Good move on the dish towels there Shirley. I may try some of that myself.
This whole precycling thing is something I think that can strike a chord across the political spectrum. My conservative friends are mostly already fiscally conservative so this ideology is a natural fit. It’s more of a bridge topic than the normal polarizing that often occurs between green and business.
I like common ground.
September 5th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Great research Shirley.
I am currently VP of a Recycling company and I have worked with hundreds of towns that do PAYT. Their waste diversion rates range from 40-55%. I have never seen a program as successful as PAYT both financially for residents and environmentally because of the giant jump in recycling rates. I am looking at starting a non-profit company that works with state government to promote PAYT. Although the EPA promotes it their resources are limited and PAYT can be a tricky political sell. So I feel an independent non-profit promoting the concept to legislators and city/town officials would make the transition easier. Polititians don’t like change unless they are sure it benefits them.
September 6th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Thanks Kristen! From everything I’ve read so far, PAYT programs are both effective for citizens AND cost-effective for communities. Good luck in your efforts to promote more of this, and please keep us posted on your success!
Jimmy, I agree: we’ve probably found more common ground here than in other other topic we’ve tackled. As you said, fiscal conservatives appreciate the importance of saving money, both publicly and at home, so precycling efforts are a no-brainer.
One more thought on reducing waste: a lot of the things we throw into the trash actually make great crafts materials for schools, kids’ museums and other children’s programs. So before you toss those egg cartons, butter containers, disposable (but washable) plastic plates and other stuff in the garbage, check to see if there’s someone in your area who could use them.