A decade ago we congratulated our cities for
introducing curbside recycling. We saw this as an important step in the right
direction: instead of throwing things away, our cities now treated waste as a
resource. Recycling became a civic responsibility that Americans came to
practice more faithfully than voting. And we continue to press our elected
officials to take further steps, like collecting more plastics.
The broad popularity of municipal recycling is often
taken as a measure of our success in sustainably redirecting our waste. But
conscientious citizens need to grapple with some troubling facts. While it is still better to recycle than to
throw everything in the trash, we have put our faith in a flawed system and
need to be conscientious as we push for better alternatives.
The numbers show that our community recycling
programs are failing to effectively deal with our waste. Many of the products
that we think are "recycled" by our community programs are actually
"downcycled." Newspapers are turned into low-value products like
cattle bedding and insulation material. Recycled glass is crushed and used in
construction as a gravel substitute (a complete write-off on the energy that
was invested to turn gravel into glass in the first place). Plastic containers
come back as textiles or throw-away garbage bags - if they come back at all.
Even when materials are recycled back into the same
product (newspapers into newspapers, for instance) there is a net environmental
cost. Thermodynamically, there is no such thing as recycling. In fact, there
are often more elegant and environmentally efficient ways of meeting our needs
which are ignored in favor of recycling.
Recycling has not reduced waste either. Even after the
enormous exertions of America's cities and towns to recycle bottles, cans,
newspapers and other consumer products, seventy percent of the products we buy
are still going to landfills and incinerators. The total quantity of throwaway
products and packaging going to America's landfills was actually larger in 2000
than in 1990 (121.3 million tons, compared to 117.5).
It's not all bad news. But to understand the problem
and what we can do about it, it helps to know what's actually in our trash, and
what our waste system was meant to handle.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
separates municipal waste into two basic categories: product-related wastes and
non-product wastes. Product-related wastes include all the durable goods we use
(appliances, furniture, books - anything that lasts over five years),
non-durable goods (newspapers, disposable diapers - anything that lasts less
than five years), and packaging. The non-product waste materials include food
scraps (about 11 percent of our total trash pile), yard trimmings (another 12
percent) and a small amount of miscellaneous inorganic waste (1.5 percent).
Unlike product-related wastes, the quantity of
non-product wastes has not increased in the past ten years. In fact, it has declined
by 1.6 million tons, despite a U.S. population increase of 13 percent. The EPA
attributes this decline to the spread of backyard composting and to
"grass-cycling" (leaving clippings on the lawn rather than bagging
them up for collection). In this way,
citizens reduce their waste “at source.” Many cities and towns no longer allow
residents to put yard waste out with the trash. In fact, many municipalities
have begun providing recycling services specifically for yard waste.
Yard waste recycling is the real recycling success
story of the 1990s. The amount of yard waste recovered for composting has grown
nearly four-fold in the United States since 1990, from 4.2 million tons to 15.8
million tons. Today, 57 percent of the yard waste generated in America's cities
and towns is recycled (compared to a 30 percent recycling rate for products and
packaging).
Diverting yard waste from landfills creates global
benefits. Organic materials in landfills are the largest manmade source of the
greenhouse gas methane, which is 21 times more potent a contributor to global
warming than carbon dioxide, the by-product of composting.
The generation of product-related wastes, however,
has increased significantly during the curbside recycling era, at a rate faster
than population growth. According to the EPA, the total quantity of products
and packaging generated as waste in the United States increased nearly 20
percent between 1990 and 2000, from 146.5 million tons to 174.7 million tons.
Why is it that product wastes continue to grow out
of control while our non-product wastes decline?
It helps to put municipal waste in perspective. At
the turn of the 20th century, the rapid industrialization of the previous
century led to urban squalor. People were crowded together in tenements,
throwing their garbage into the streets. But a dedicated urban reform movement
helped to establish municipal sanitation departments. Uniformed crews began to
provide convenient collection and disposal of municipal waste. The system was
overseen by municipal engineers who convinced local elected officials to invest
in modern waste disposal technologies such as "sanitary" landfills,
waste-to-energy combustion facilities and recycling plants.
As time went by, the waste stream changed. In 1905
municipal waste consisted of household ashes from cooking and heating (75
percent), kitchen scraps (16 percent) and miscellaneous rubbish (7 percent). A
century later, the ashes were gone, but the "miscellaneous rubbish"
(today's consumer products and packaging) had swelled to take their place.
It only seems sensible, when you think about it,
that there would be such explosive growth in throwaway products and packaging.
Municipal waste management is provided as a public service, perceived by
citizens as a free resource. There is no incentive to economize on waste either
at the household level or, more importantly, in the marketplace.
Producers of consumer products never thought twice
about designing their products to be thrown away. It started with the
convenient "no deposit no return" pop can which consumers were urged
to toss in the trash rather than return to the store to be refilled. And it
continues today with a new generation of throwaways: consumer electronics. The
personal computer is the pop can of the cyber age, a disposable container for
quickly obsolescing information technology.
Computer makers have shipped hundreds of millions of
units without ever a thought of what would happen to them when the newer,
better, faster version became available. And it is local cities and towns
that are expected to bear the brunt of the problem. These computers are
"municipal waste," the responsibility of local governments, to be
managed in a system that was designed a century ago for ashes and food scraps.
So what is the alternative? At the same time that
North American cities and towns were beginning to budget for recycling, there
was a quiet policy revolution underway in Europe and the Canadian province of
British Colombia. There, governments and a handful of citizens were questioning
the century-old assumption that local communities should clean up after the
Disposable Society.
A new waste policy known as Extended Producer
Responsibility (EPR) has led to the adoption of laws in many parts of the world
that require any company that sells a consumer product to provide
"cradle-to-cradle" take-back service to its consumers. In British
Columbia these laws are being introduced one product category at a time. First
the producers of paint were called to the table and required to set up a
program to take back and recycle their products from consumers. Then the
producers of pesticides, pharmaceuticals, fuels, and paint thinners. Then
beverage producers. Most recently the producers of packaged motor oil and oil
filters. Soon it will be tires and batteries. Then British Columbia will likely
follow Europe's example and require EPR for electronic products.
Cities and towns in British Columbia are now able to
ban these products from their waste management programs, reminding citizens to
look to the producer for the waste solutions. People living in British Columbia
imagine a day when cities and towns will devote their resources to developing
state-of-the-art composting and sewage treatment systems - not to mention
libraries, parks and schools - while recycling of consumer products and
packaging will be a thriving commercial activity. It will be carried out in
what some like to call "discard malls." It will be a profitable
activity because products will be designed for recycling and reuse, rather than
for the landfill.
This is the New American
Dream - that the consumer products industry can eliminate waste by effectively
managing its resources. It will take conscientious citizens to send this
message to our civic leaders. While we must currently make do with recycling,
it is only one small part of waste management and we can do much better. As long as communities continue to pick up
after producers of disposable products, producers will never learn how to pick
up after themselves.
Helen
Spiegelman is Vice President of the Society Promoting Environmental
Conservation (SPEC) in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Sidebox:
What Can We
Do? Many things!
On a personal level, recycling is still preferable to
throwing paper and other materials in the trash. But there are many actions we can take that are more
environmentally sound.
On a community level, forming a Zero Waste Task Force or
other community action group can encourage local officials to regulate out-of-control
product waste. Tax dollars spent on waste management can be diverted to other
community services, such as schools, parks, libraries and policing.
Many additional resources, including information on community organizing, are available through the GrassRoots Recycling Network at www.grrn.org/zerowaste/community/index.html