Does re-cycling do more harm than good?

The life of a scholar at the Getty Research Institute is not quite the luxurious existence that it is sometimes made out to be. It is true, though, that the rubbish in our apartment block is taken care of. We put it in big communal bins – then it’s taken away. But the other morning I did catch sight of what I call a “dustbin lorry” (?”garbage truck”) coming up our street and stopped for a moment to wonder at its sophistication.

The green, black and blue bins were lined up neatly by the curbside. But there was no jolly crew of bin men heaving (or guiding) the rubbish into the lorry. This contraption appeared to be operated by one man only – who manipulated a clever couple of prongs which emerged from the lorry’s side and gripped each bin and poured its contents into the bowels of the lorry.

The only trouble was that the contents of each bin, no matter what colour, all seemed to go into the same bowel. It is, of course, possible that I missed some clever internal sorting device, which separated the different sorts of rubbish as it poured out. But there was no sign of it from where I was looking.

To put it another way, so far as I could tell, the good burghers of Brentwood (or more likely their servants) had spent many an hour sorting their trash into what was  biodegradable/re-cyclable and what was not . . . only to have it all mixed back up again when it got taken away.

This is not going to turn in to a Daily-Mail-style tirade about the follies of fortnightly bin collections. But I should say that I am a bit ambivalent about the recycling industry.

On the one hand, I am entirely in favour of decreasing the amount of rubbish that has to be disposed of. The reason for this is simple enough. Landfill sites are fast running out. And, if we want to avoid the current mess in Naples – where the bin men are on strike because they claim there is literally nowhere to put the rubbish – then we have to change our habits, and very quickly. Whether than means composting, recycling, zero-packaging or what, we have to mend our ways if we don't want to be bumping into used disposable nappies as we walk along the street.

On the other, I have yet to be convinced (even without the Brentwood incident) that re-cycling quite delivers what it promises. The sight of the liberal middle-class shopper carefully picking up the re-cycled paper kitchen towels from the supermarket shelf, while still driving a four by four and/or flying off for half a dozen weekend breaks (or instead of just buying an old-fashioned cloth, for heaven’s sake) makes the heart sink.

Still, you might say, small gesture though it is, it is surely better to buy re-cycled paper towels than the other sort. I’m not so sure. The problem is that the amount of high-minded effort that goes into recycling at home (all that careful sorting of the plastic bottles from the glass ones, the removal of the plastic cover from the newspaper supplement you never read, and so on) tends to make you feel that you have already done your bit for the planet. “I recycle so I’m OK.”

While from the government point of view, it is so much cheaper to have an advertising campaign to explain what we can put in our green bins, than to invest in an energy efficient, green-ish public transport system that people will choose to use.

The truth is that saving the planet will cost money. Domestic recycling is just the ‘feel-good’ side of it -- which doesn't begin to get to the heart of the problem.

Comments

[Tony Francis]

I recall watching the TV documentary "The World At War", which was narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier. They interviewed the British Home Secretary, and he was laughing about the "pots and pans" drives they had during WW II. Everyone was donating their cooking ware, with the idea that they would make airplanes from them. Instead, they hauled them off to storage dumps. It was all a big publicity campaign designed to get the average person for feel like they were "involved" in the war effort. I wonder how much of our recycling is a similar kind of thing.

[Resolute Reader]

Should anyone be desperate for something to read, I've finally got around to reviewing Helen Rogers' book on Garbage.

The post is here:

http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/2007/06/heather-rogers-gone-tomorrow-hidden.html

[Paul Palmer]

Mary has it right but for the wrong reasons. Garbage is not obsolete because of the absence of DUMPS (not landfill. There is no land anywhere waiting to be filled with garbage - "Landfill" is a clear attempt to make dumps sound fragrant) All of the damage of dumping is done in the moment of discard - in fact earlier, when manufacturing is designed for early discard, making the later discard already inevitable and wasting all of the resources that need to be constantly mined and raised and grown and thieved from the commons to serve the gods of obsolescence. The dump is only a very visible manifestation of the resource inefficiency of our present system of frenzied consumption. The far more important evil is in product design. The philosophy of redesign for endless reuse is called Zero Waste and it has nothing to do with recycling (a failure) or garbage (an abomination). Rather it engages with design in the places where design happens, namely in industrial design departments and in the design of business models. Take note recyclers: there is no design worth mentioning in the ass end of the process, where discard is already history and all that is left is a desperate attempt to either find a place to put the discards (stupid) or some last minute desperate scramble to invent some lame way to reuse that which was designed to be unreusable.
When products and processes are designed for perpetual reuse, garbage and dumps will fade away as a distant, distasteful memory.
Do you Brits realize that Zero Waste is one of the pillars of the Royal Society for the Arts program as shown on their website? Unfortunately their compatriots seem to prefer pissing and moaning to intelligent discussion of resource usage so the RSA discussion languishes without contributions.
For a bit more info, consult the following: http://www.precaution.org/lib/07/ht070329.htm#The_Death_of_Recycling

[Robert]

Catherine's plea reminds me of a guide book to Siberia I found some years ago. It reported that a good reason to go there was visit the market and to see the sight of milk being sold (frozen) in blocks, and not bottles. I wonder if global-warming has brought that economical method of non-packaging to an end?

[Catherine Osborne]

In my view, we badly need to find ways of eliminating the packaging. How did it ever happen that we became accustomed to buying things wrapped and bottled? Supermarkets presumably, and not walking to the shop with a basket.
On this theme see my "What does it mean to be green?" Blog, and particularly the post at http://cathythinksagain.blogspot.com/2007/05/milk-cartons.html

[Joaquin Ayala]

For whatever it's worth, here is a link to an interesting paper which lists some of the myths of the recycling movement. As usual, the hard cold facts get a lot less press play than the emotion based rants of a few misguided environmentalists. The truth of the matter is that if you really want to save the planet, recycling, at least in its current form, is indeed doing more harm than good.

http://www.perc.org/pdf/ps28.pdf

[ResoluteReader]

Can I recommend "Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage" the recent book by Heather Rogers. Heather looks at lots of the things you mention, includign the idea that recycling distracts from the real issue - why we make so many products for disposal, she also looks at the issue of companies making products with short life spans - something that started during the US economic boom of the 50s.... and she examines the various ingenious (and insane) methods of waste disposal. Review on my blog site when I get 10 minutes!

[Tony Francis]

Justin Lake is correct about local politics. With all the empty space there is in Kansas, Sedgwick County (Wichita), has been looking for a new landfill for about 20 years. They were hauling to a county about 60 miles away until several law suits stopped that. Then they were hauling to Oklahoma. Finally, they found only one place they could put a landfill in the whole state. Then someone looked at a map, and realized that it was in the flight path of one of the local airplane company landing strips. Birds flying around the landfill would be a potential hazard to approaching airplanes. So, there's just no where to put it. (!!) I have heard they are shipping garbage from New Jersey to Nevada in railroad cars. They say one can smell the train before it can be seen or heard. Another problem is what they call "dirty dirt": soil from chemical or nuclear polluted areas, especially in Ohio and the east coast. They ship that to Nevada, also.

[Zareen P. Bharucha]

Tony,
I go to the University of Essex.

I first heard about this problem in a class on environmental movements; a Japanese girl gave us a presentation on the issue. I asked some of my Chinese flatmates about it and they said they saw tonnes of "British garbage" lying around, waiting to be recycled. I haven't researched the issue further, though I really should have: what else am I a research student doing Environmental Studies for?! I will get back to you with a list of references and news items, if you like. And you're right: this sounds like a humanitarian issue. But then, most environmental issues also imply humanitarian crises, and vice versa.

Back to my reading!
Zareen

[Tony Francis]

Zareen, what part of the world is your school? Just curious. I haven't been to grad school since 1999, but as I mentioned earlier, the Chinese students we had were obsessed about bio-degradable plastic. Have you had a similar experience? I read somewhere on line that China was getting a lot of refuse shipped in, which of course, wastes a lot of fuel in the process. I don't know how accurate that is. I saw a TV program about a year ago showing Africa (I think), with mounds of old computer monitors, etc. just sitting in the mud streets. Supposedly they were being "recycled". Does anyone know anything about this? It seems almost like a human rights issue to me. The government of our small town arbitrarily decided we would recycle. So now we pay $4 a month to recycle. I was separating all the plastic, like I was supposed to. Then I saw the recycle person just throwing it in the garbage! I called the city to complain. They had hired a person who came out to "re-educate" me on recycling. They can't do anything with that plastic, anyway. So I just throw it out. Those plastic bags from Walmart are the worst. One thing: when the newspaper is recycled, I hardly have any trash, most weeks... less than 1/4 of a trash bin; some weeks, nothing. I mulch all the grass, leaves, coffee grounds, etc. Makes better garden dirt.

[Justin Lake]

There is actually a very large surplus of landfill space in the U.S., one reason that there is so little economic incentive to recycle. Moreover, it is not a lack of landfill space, but local politics and the influence of the Camorra, coupled with an understandable, if excessive, amount of NIMBY-ism, that are responsible for the pileup of waste in the streets of Naples.

[Zareen]

Dear Mary;
You're right - recycling is increasingly about greenwash. From what I hear from my Chinese friends at university, Chinese ports receive tonnes and tonnes of rubbish from the UK - to be recycled (it's cheaper to do it there and possibly, less well regulated). So the UK is outsourcing even its garbage disposal. The environmental costs of this practice parallel - or even dwarf - the environmental costs of the rubbish itself.
And from what I see on the streets and on campus, only a reduction in packaging is going to solve the problem. People simply do not care enough (for whatever reason) to throw litter into a bin (let alone a bin seperated for different types of rubbish) that is two feet away from them.
And this is the 'developed' world!?

[Mark Cruickshank]

The majority of working class people have enough on their plates without having to worry about sifting through their rubbish to put into different coloured bins.

Post-kerbside collection, material recovery facilities are employed to sift through the waste, using both manual and automated techniques.

But the lists of materials used are mind-boggling. From Wikipedia:- Glass, ferrous metal, aluminium and other non-ferrous metals, PET [No.1] and HDPE [No.2] plastics.

Then there is paper - which is further subdivided into old newspapers with their inserts, old magazines and kraft (brown) paper bags, old corrugated, junk mail, telephone books and paperboard.

These so-called MRFs have trouble doing the separating, so how can the ordinary busy human be expected to keep track of which bin the 'HDPE' plastic goes into?

Wouldn't time be better spent reducing the number of alternative packagings on household goods so as to eliminate all this time and energy-consuming separating? Would people really mind if all milk was sold in plastic bottles instead of waxed cardboard cartons, glass bottles, plastic bags or metal cans?

[SW Foska]

Sounds like they drive pretty crazy over there. This side of the pond I’ve never seen any ‘liberal middle-class shopper carefully picking up the re-cycled paper kitchen towels from the supermarket shelf, while still driving a four by four’; they usually park their vehicles outside the supermarket. And what would they need an ‘old-fashioned cloth’ for? Bullfighting? Wearing under their togas?

[arindam bandyopadhaya]

Mary please visit Calcutta once and see for yourself how garbage is collected. calcutta municipal corporation has huge trucks covered on top by wire netting; the house holders throw/discharge their kitchen bin,plastics and all refuse inside the truck. there are men within the truck who immediately scavenge for anything valuable with their bare hands; the ragpickers of ancient memory!

[Tony Francis]

During the 1980's, we were bombarded by dire predictions about depletion of the ozone layer by CFC's, mainly Freon. It was similar to what we hear today about global warming. As it turned out, the campaign was carefully orchestrated by DuPont Chemical, who owned the patent on Freon. The patent was due to expire in 1996. They were desperate to get all Freon banned, and replaced with a different agent for which they held the patent. Now, we use (patent protected) HCFC's or HFC's. The ozone is apparently healing. My advisor in chemistry grad school used to joke about it. HCFC and HFC are just as damaging to the ozone as CFC. HCFC and HFC are also global warming agents. As it turned out, the US Air Force was using about 95% of the CFC consumed in the world; they sprayed the wings of F-16's with it. I haven't heard a word about the ozone in over 15 years, since the new patent went into effect.

[Eiron]

Check out your temporary city's recycling policy and that might throw some light on it. In NYC it is the law that all buildings recycle but we do get the same phenomena, and it is simply because the trash is being taken off to a sorting facility.

So don't lose heart :)

[Tony Francis]

Paper recycling in the US has been adversly affected by Canadian subsidies to their lumber industry. In litigation which began in 1982, the US claimed Canada was unfairly subsidizing wood coming into the US. The case still goes on. It has been divided into four parts (called Lumber I through IV): Lumber I: There was a finding that the Canadians were not subsidizing the wood industry. The dispute arose because most lumber in Canada comes from government land, and the cutting fees were being set arbitrarily low. Lumber II: Filed in 1986, there was a finding of a subsidy, and a tariff of 15% was set by the US. Lumber III: Filed in 1991, found that countervailing duties could be imposed by the US; 1996, Canadian exports were limited. The agreement was complicated by NAFTA. Lumber IV: Filed in 2001, found Canada was "dumping" not only wood, but paper as well in the US. Apparently, this was to create jobs in Canada. Of course, Canada denies all this. There are dozens of websites defending the Canadian position. They are quite articulate in stating they are not guilty of anything. Apparently, the situation has been resolved, with Canada being re-imbursed $4 billion as of fall of 2006. No one is happy with the settlement. But the US paper recycling industry has had a difficult time, financially because of cheap Canadian paper.

[Tony Francis]

When I was in chemistry grad school, all the Chinese students (and there were a lot of them), had a mania about plastic, and the fact that it wouldn't degrade. Several did research projects on bio-degradable plastic. It seemed to be a national obsession. I have noticed that anything plastic I buy (usually from Walmart, made in China), seems to break down in rapid fashion. I bought some flower pots last year, and they had degraded by this spring. Maybe it is just anecdotal. But it is good economics, since I have to go back to Walmart and buy more of them. Except this time, I am considering ones from Mexico. Recycling plastic is difficult. Wikipedia states: "[plastic] is a long polymer with a low entropy of mixing and a very high enthalpy. This makes recycling difficult." A polymer is a repeating chemical unit, and no one in any chemistry department knows what entropy or enthalpy is, so don't feel bad. So far as I know, there is no economically feasible way to recycle plastic. Wikipedia says the UK is doing it with drink bottles. One problem is transporting it. It creates more CO2 than it saves. I knew a lawyer who had made millions suing tampon and drug companies. He decided he was going to solve the plastic problem. This proved to be a combination of hubris and old age. He ended up losing several million dollars, then he died. He was making those wood replacement park benches. No one would buy them for what it cost to make them.

[anthony alcock]

The same homogenized treatment is doled out to the different coloured bottles we throw into various containers here (Germany). The containers are all emptied one by one (green , brown and clear) into one very large undifferentiated container. The recyclable plastic stuff used to get shipped to poorer countries for incineration. But I think recycling technology has now developed to the point where some of it can actually be recycled here.

[Tony Francis]

A few years ago, National Geographic had an article which claimed that 60% of the roof area in the US could provide all the electricity needs for the country with existing solar technology. This would reduce the need for electric generation to virtualy nothing. The system would feed electricity into a grid, which would go to areas where it happened to be cloudy. This seems to be such a rational idea. The only problem is the coal industry. People aren't aware how big it is. There are over 120 + mile long coal trains a day coming out of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, every day. This is a massive industry with huge political clout. Look on Google Earth at North Platte, Nebraska. This is the largest rail yard in the world. On the north end, there are 15-20 empty coal trains, each more than a mile long, sitting in reserve, to fill in for coal trains that break down. The UP track through Nebraska carries over 150 freight trains a day. More than 100 of these are coal trains. It is difficult to fight that kind of economic power.

[Tony Francis]

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." Gandhi

"Civilisation, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants." Gandhi

"God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west...keeping the world in chains. If India took to similar exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts." Gandhi

Mary, I found that Anatole France quote...it is a little different, and more cynical than you recalled: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread."

[Emanuel Appel]

a letter from San Francisco

Dear Mary,

I have a similar garbage truck go by my house and the items are kept separate. Why don't you talk to the driver? Oh, you may not know Spanish.

Living in Brentwood is hardly roughing it. You are not going to lord it over the natives re ecology except by moving to Santa Monica. There, the latte-sipping crowd may pay polite attention to your dicta but certainly only the very wealthy show-biz types are willing to pay a few pennies more for your "green " ideas.

Why not regale us with stories of classical bio degradation?