The End of Recycling, But...

[_honorentheos]

Thought some here might be interested in reading this, which gets into the issue of consumption and recycling going in opposite trajectories:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ ... sh/584131/

For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics. Waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling. These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.

Most are choosing the latter. “We are doing our best to be environmentally responsible, but we can’t afford it,” said Judie Milner, the city manager of Franklin, New Hampshire. Since 2010, Franklin has offered curbside recycling and encouraged residents to put paper, metal, and plastic in their green bins. When the program launched, Franklin could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate. One-fifth of Franklin’s residents live below the poverty line, and the city government didn’t want to ask them to pay more to recycle, so all those carefully sorted bottles and cans are being burned. Milner hates knowing that Franklin is releasing toxins into the environment, but there’s not much she can do. “Plastic is just not one of the things we have a market for,” she said.

I would get some flak years ago for noting that campaigns to encourage kids to recycle or office programs that tote recycling as green were creating an inflated false sense of accomplishment when the problems around consumption and the waste it generates are systemic rather than purely behavioral. We live in a society where we are not only capable of creating much more than we need to consume, but are virtually compelled to participate in over consumption else the wheels start to fall off. As consumers, we have been long studied and modeled in order for those needing our consumption to know what string to pull, what button to press to ensure we buy more stuff because we know we need it for reasons. Recycling was a sort of panacea for western capitalism, allowing the constant churn of production -> consumption -> obsolescence -> replacement/upgrading -> production -> consumption ->...to continue as it was imagined or even sold as a perpetual motion machine.

Cradle to cradle was/is an idea that we could, through technology, figure out how to make stuff whose waste becomes other stuff, and whose disposal becomes even more other stuff such that the cycle can carry on forever. It's how nature works, right? What is born consumes what has died, and every potential source of life-sustaining matter becomes a niche exploited by an organism in evolution's way of ensure nothing goes to waste, right? So the question naturally followed, "Why can't industry work like this where everything we need to make in order to run factories that create jobs that support other jobs that support people having jobs talking about jobs, that support people shouting at one another on TV or posting photos on Instagram so people will buy the stuff being made for them all become the source for something else rather than waste?"

I don't think that our present course is sustainable. The system is the problem and the solution is not going to come from trying to game it to create a perpetual motion machine. It's going to have to come from changing the social order that removes our need to produce so much in order to have an economy with jobs. It's going to take radical changes to do more than just bring recycling back into affordability. But then, how does one do this and maintain standards of living, a commitment to small "d" democratic ideals, or avert the world falling into a new dark age of sorts where tyrants rule and consumption is abated by knocking people down the rungs to where they just can't afford to participate in consumption while the group gaining from what commerce occurs becomes smaller and excluded from the outcomes of simply reducing participation in consumption? I think this is where we see discussions come up around universal basic income at the one end, while the assumption remains that the people who are just scraping by will need to lower their expectations even as the consumption machine pumps out the stuff envy that fuels our urge to buy. Meaning, we can't just pick up one end of that stick, in my opinion.

Anyway, Saturday morning thoughts on the direction of society beyond just politics to go with a nice cup of <insert brand of choice> coffee while reading on a <insert brand of mobile phone or tablet of choice>.

[_Gadianton]

I used to tell my wife that I was doing better for the planet than she, although I never recycle, because I consume about 1/20th of the junk that she does. Sure, it's great to put all that plastic junk into the blue container, but if you don't buy it in the first place, that's even better. But then, I wondered if I was wrong about that. If I'm not consuming, then I'm saving, and that savings is loaned out with a multiplier effect to the ultimate end of somebody consuming, and so presumably by not consuming so much I am creating a bigger problem.

Maybe it's a good thing that other countries aren't taking our junk, because then we can bury it for future use, after we run out of natural resources altogether.

by the way, do you ever watch those home improvement shows where people make houses out of shipping containers and stuff like that?

[_Jersey Girl]

I saw this headline earlier today but didn't read the article. I'm sure it's the same one posted in the OP.

One of our local elementary schools is a project based learning school. This month the students began working on a recycling project. For years, I taught PBL and worked recycle/reduce/reuse into environmental curriculum. But that was preschoolers.

I'm wondering how elementary schools, and above, are going to present this issue to their students and wonder what direction the curriculum might take. I know some very gung ho grade schoolers who are going to be disappointed by this. If I were to do some steering...I would take it a step further and open up the discussion "What can we do about it?" and ultimately encourage students to investigate ways to eliminate plastics. I know we wove this into a thread on the board at one point.

Before disposable plastics, we used glass. Does anyone know what the implications would be (cost, environmental, job creation) to our society returning to glass products?

I confess I have no idea myself.

[_Jersey Girl]

by the way, do you ever watch those home improvement shows where people make houses out of shipping containers and stuff like that?

YES, on youtube! Also tiny homes.

[_honorentheos]

by the way, do you ever watch those home improvement shows where people make houses out of shipping containers and stuff like that?

I don't but I'm familiar with them from my professional background. It's been interesting to watch the evolution of what I thought of as the countermovement to the conspicuous consumption of buying a McMansion in the 90s to what seems now to be moving away from homeownership or even detached single family burbs. Serving a mission in Europe was paradigm shifting for me in that I found I really liked living in an apartment in a major city that was so far away from what I grew up with as the ideal. I was into the "not-so-big-house" idea centered around architect Sarah Susanka when that was a thing, and still see the underlying concepts of quality over quantity as at least one positive move in adapting one's consumption of space/stuff/time. But that's also subjective.

Anyway, I'm largely of the opinion that the forces behind the social strain the west is going through right now will be ultimately disruptive of the consumption cycle so I'm also inclined to see solutions to the problems we face (global climate change, the segregation of global wealth into fewer and fewer hands, the influence of global corporations in conflict with nation-states, etc.) requiring wholesale changes in the way we do things rather than adaptations of scale. Small spaces are cool. But if we can't figure out how to deal with an economy that demands we constantly buy things in order for society to keep together we're probably heading for a forced change we won't be ready for and will be the black swan of black swan events.

Since it's always easier to call out problems rather than solutions, I find myself wondering how much can be changed by moving away from the production of things and into the production of services/experiences where the economic cycle has less to do with consumption of stuff? The problem right now is we can't seem to market ideas and experiences as well as we can create demand for stuff that other people see and get jealous of so they have to get new stuff, etc., etc. Though it seems the younger generation is moving more in that direction or at least absorbing the commodification and display of experiences in ways that create demand while not requiring as much physical stuff. But what doesn't seem to be tied to this is turning it into income generation that the masses can tap into to earn a living.

[_honorentheos]

Before disposable plastics, we used glass. Does anyone know what the implications would be (cost, environmental, job creation) to our society returning to glass products?

The capitalist in you should already know the answer to this. There's a reason returning to glass is something one sees touted by the same people who do yoga classes as exercise and shop for groceries at Whole Foods while the people buying food at discount stores are buying things in plastic, drinking out of plastic, and storing food in plastic. Except for what they bottle or can themselves...

[_honorentheos]

I came across this article which is interesting in it's take on things like barter economies where exchange usually occurs between people exchanging things they no longer need but which has value to someone else:

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011 ... l-economy/

It's an older article from the middle of the great recession but it points out something that is easy to forget in a world where every economic news report is on the current state of the Dow Jones: For most people, that isn't the "real" economy.

[_Jersey Girl]

Before disposable plastics, we used glass. Does anyone know what the implications would be (cost, environmental, job creation) to our society returning to glass products?

The capitalist in you should already know the answer to this. There's a reason returning to glass is something one sees touted by the same people who do yoga classes as exercise and shop for groceries at Whole Foods while the people buying food at discount stores are buying things in plastic, drinking out of plastic, and storing food in plastic. Except for what they bottle or can themselves...

I don't think I made myself clear.

Can we go back to recyclable glass without wrecking the environment? Would it create more jobs? Would it be cost effective to do so?

I'm talking about the same thing as the fossil fuel industry eventually having to become a solar industry, windmills, and crap like that.

[_honorentheos]

I don't think I made myself clear.

Can we go back to recyclable glass without wrecking the environment? Would it create more jobs? Would it be cost effective to do so?

I'm talking about the same thing as the fossil fuel industry eventually having to become a solar industry, windmills, and crap like that.

I thought you were being clear. I also thought that it should be fairly apparent that the world left glass for plastics in the mid-20th century for economic reasons, and the ability to move back at the moment is the privilege of economic status. All of which suggests the answer to the questions being asked. Now, as the oil needed to make plastics becomes more expensive perhaps it will flip. Who knows.

BUT, and I thought this was clear in the OP, its a bit like worrying if one left the stove on as one watches a tornado tear the roof off of one's house. Recycling is nice in theory, and perhaps a reasonable response on an individual basis given the realities of consumptive-based economics, but it's an illusion of the consumption cycle that we can somehow or other sustain a world built on creating demand for things that go beyond need. We have gone very far down a road that demands we continuously accelerate our consumption in order to sustain our way of life, create jobs, and grow the economy. And the cracks are increasingly starting to show. Recycling may keep something out of a landfill or incinerator but it is treating a symptom rather than the root of a problem.

Creating jobs is a weird metric because it is usually at odds with profit motives. Could going to glass create more jobs? Possibly. Blowing handmade glass bottles would certainly create many more jobs than having a machine do it, too. But then a company that uses a machine would be able to sell their glass bottles for less while making more money per bottle so consumers are going to buy the less expensive bottle and support the company with one guy operating a machine rather than the company employing an army of artisan glass blowers. And the company making plastic bottles with a machine that costs even less to make per bottle is going to be supported by more people who are trying to stretch a dollar. Economics being what it is, eventually the majority of bottles will be made of plastic by machines while companies making artisan handblown glass bottles will either find their niche consumer(s) and likely be of limited size or, in the case of the majority, go out of business. It takes having a certain amount of discretionary surplus income to afford to make decisions based on more than what provides the best value. The more pinched people become, and the more people being pinched, drown out individual behavioral choices requiring a certain level of privilege. The primary dynamics at play is the demand for the thing in the bottle one wants to buy in the first place.

Want to see real change? It probably will need to take the form of changing the entire dynamics involved rather than focusing on finding a more sustainable, less expensive means of making containers in which to store and sell stuff. in my opinion.