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Yves here. This article describes how the good intentions of the push for more recycling have gone awry. The causes are many, but particularly prominent are lack of clear guidance to consumers on what is worth recycling and poor consumer and trash hauler compliance. People in my old building would regularly put general garbage in the recycling bins. Of course, they may have heard the probably accurate rumor that the contents of the recycling containers were tossed in with the garbage when the Sanitation Department trucks arrived.<\/p>\n
This piece shows how the recycling push has encouraged consumers to accept wasteful packaging, particularly plastics, when forcing the use of more biodegradable material would have been a less damaging course of action.<\/p>\n
By Kate Yoder. Originally published at Grist; cross posted from Yale Climate Connections<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n t\u2019s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She\u2019s distraught about the state of the environment. \u201cIt\u2019s crazy what we\u2019re doing. It\u2019s very, very, very bad,\u201d she says in ABC\u2019s prime-time Earth Day special<\/a>, letting out heavy sighs and listing jumbled statistics about deforestation and the hole in the ozone layer.<\/p>\n The bartender, Kevin Costner, says he used to be scared, too \u2014 until he started doing something about it. \u201cThese?\u201d he says, holding up a soda can. \u201cI recycle these.\u201d As Streep prepares to launch her beer can into the recycling bin, Costner cautions her, \u201cThis could change your life.\u201d<\/p>\n Recycling, once considered the domain of people with \u201clong hair, granny glasses, and tie-dyed Ts,\u201d as the Chicago Tribune described it at the time, was about to go mainstream. The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol, invented 20 years earlier, was everywhere in the early 1990s. Its tight spiral of folded arrows seemed to promise that discarded glass bottles and yellowing newspapers had a bright future, where they could be reborn in a cycle that stretched to infinity. As curbside pickup programs spread across the United States, the practice of sorting your trash would become, for many, as routine as brushing your teeth \u2014 an everyday habit that made you feel a little more responsible.<\/p>\n What no one anticipated was just how emotionally attached people would become to recycling as the solution to America\u2019s ugly trash problem. When the chasing arrows\u2019 promise of rebirth was broken, they could get angry. One cold winter day in 1991, people in Holyoke, Massachusetts, chased after garbage trucks, yelling for them to stop, after the drivers had nabbed their sorted glass, cans, and cardboard from the curb. Strained by an influx of holiday-related trash, the city had instructed workers to forgo recycling and just throw everything away.<\/p>\n Today, the recycling icon is omnipresent \u2014 found on plastic bottles, cereal boxes, and bins loitering alongside curbs across the country. The chasing arrows, though, are often plastered on products that aren\u2019t recyclable at all, particularly products made of plastic, like dog chew toys and inflatable swim rings. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency said that the symbol\u2019s use on many plastic products was \u201cdeceptive<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Recycling rules can be downright mystifying. For years, people were told pizza boxes were too greasy to be recycled, but now many recycling centers accept them<\/a>. Some cities accept juice boxes lined with invisible layers of aluminum and plastic; others don\u2019t. And do the screw-on caps stay on plastic bottles<\/a> or not? Recycling experts ask people to do a \u201clittle bit of homework<\/a>\u201d to figure out what their local recycling system can handle, but since households have hundreds of items with different packaging to keep track of, that\u2019s asking a lot.<\/p>\n The resulting confusion has made a mess of recycling efforts. Plastic wrap tangles around sorting equipment at recycling facilities, shutting down operations<\/a> as employees try to cut it out of the equipment. Huge bales of paper shipped overseas can contain as much as 30 percent plastic waste<\/a>. \u201cContamination is one of the biggest challenges facing the recycling industry,\u201d the EPA said in a statement to Grist. It takes time and money to haul, sort through, and dispose of all this unwanted refuse, which makes recycling more of a burden for city budgets. Many cities have ended up cutting costs by working with private waste companies<\/a>; some don\u2019t even bother trying at all. About a quarter of Americans lack access<\/a> to any recycling services.<\/p>\n The difficulty of recycling plastic can make the chasing-arrows symbol near meaningless, with environmental groups calling plastic recycling a \u201cfalse solution.\u201d<\/a> Only around 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States<\/a> gets shredded or melted down so that it can be used again. Much of the rest flows into landfills or gets incinerated, breaking down into tiny particles that can travel for thousands of miles<\/a> and lodge themselves in your lungs<\/a>. Plastics threaten \u201cnear-permanent contamination of the natural environment,\u201d according to one study<\/a>, and pose a global health crisis<\/a>, with plastic chemicals linked to preterm births<\/a>, heart attacks<\/a>, and cancer<\/a>.<\/p>\n So where did the three arrows go wrong? The trouble is that their loop has ensnared us. If some recycling is good, the thinking goes, then more recycling is better. That creates enormous pressure for packaging to be made recyclable and stamped with the arrows \u2014 regardless of whether trying to recycle a glass bottle or plastic yogurt container made much sense in the first place. David Allaway, a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, says that the facts just don\u2019t support the recycling symbol\u2019s reputation as a badge of environmental goodness. \u201cThe magnetic, gravitational power of recycling,\u201d he said, has led \u201cpolicymakers and the public to just talk more and more and more about recycling, and less and less and less about anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n In the spring of 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans \u2014 10 percent of the population \u2014 showed up for the first Earth Day, taking part in rallies, marches, and teach-ins, calling for clean air and clean water. Pollution had pushed its way into the national conversation. The year before, oil-soaked debris had caught fire in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, sending flames towering five stories high<\/a>, and a drilling accident in Santa Barbara had spread an oil slick over more than 800 square miles of water<\/a>. Smog regularly clouded skies from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles, dimming cities in the middle of the day.<\/p>\n The idea of recycling seemingly burst onto the scene in 1970. Earth Day organizers educated people about the value of sorting through their trash and advocated for community recycling programs. People would gather up their bottles and cans in plastic crates and bags and drive to designated sites to drop them off, sometimes earning a few bucks in return. \u201cThe environmental crisis has come into the public consciousness so recently that the word \u2018recycle\u2019 doesn\u2019t even appear in most dictionaries,\u201d the environmentalist Garrett De Bell wrote<\/a> a couple weeks before the Earth Day event. He pitted recycling as \u201cthe only ecologically sensible long-term solution\u201d for a country \u201cknee-deep in garbage.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t long before the concept acquired its signature symbol. At the time, Gary Anderson was finishing up his master\u2019s degree in architecture at the University of Southern California. He came across a poster advertising a contest to design a symbol for recycling, sponsored by the Container Corporation of America, a maker of cardboard boxes. Inspired by M.C. Escher\u2019s M\u00f6bius strip<\/a>, Anderson spent just a couple of days coming up with designs using the now-famous trio of folded, rotating arrows. The simplest of his designs won, and Anderson was awarded a $2,500 scholarship in 1970. The Container Corporation quickly put the logo in the public domain<\/a>, hoping it would be adopted on all recycled or recyclable products in order to \u201cspread awareness among concerned citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n The M\u00f6bius loop he created soon passed from his mind. \u201cI just didn\u2019t really think of the symbol that much,\u201d he recalls. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t used very much in the first couple of years.\u201d One day several years later, however, Anderson was wandering through the streets of Amsterdam in the haze of jet lag when he came across a row of oversized bins emblazoned with a beach ball-sized version of his logo. The Netherlands, purportedly, was the first country to launch a nationwide recycling program<\/a> in 1972. \u201cIt just really shocked me into a realization that there must be something about this symbol,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n An early draft of the recycling symbol, sent in a letter designer Gary Anderson wrote to his mother. \u201cThis is the closest thing I have to a preliminary sketch,\u201d Anderson said. The original sketch, made used only drafting instruments, was destroyed in a fire in Anderson\u2019s garage. Courtesy of Gary Anderson<\/p>\n