Hinton: Recycling no good when misused

I hate recycling. The whole ordeal of searching for blue bags, green containers, special pick-up… I hate recycling. The whole ordeal of searching for blue bags, green containers, special pick-up days and ‘glass only’ bins is little more than a dog and pony show. Recycling has all of the sacrifice of modern rituals such as giving blood or sponsoring poor, foreign children with none of the life-saving. Recyclers are also passionately self-satisfied. Now, I am not denying that recycling is better than stacking our jars and pizza boxes until our landfills becomes glittering, corrugated monoliths. My objection to recycling is that it gives a wasteful public a gold star for making a minor change in their habits. Rather than taking steps to more legitimately reduce his environmental impact, the average American crams glass after glass into his cerulean sacks and waits for the big truck to pick it up. Pleased with his green habits, he drives his car to the nearest Costco warehouse and buys another flat of glass peanut butter jars. Blinded by the smug achievement of recycling, we overlook far more effective measures such as the two ‘R’s that come before ‘recycle’ in the famous trinity, ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.’ Recycling is not a zero-sum enterprise, but we convince ourselves that as long as our Snapple bottle gets in the right chute, we have done no harm. In fact, we have. Recycling takes energy, and there are few products that can be reformed into new goods in their entirety. Fossil fuels power the cars that take our bottles to the machine that takes fossil fuels to sculpt our bottles into new bottles that will be taken back to the store in other cars that use fossil fuels. With such an arithmetic of carbon footprints, it makes one wonder why we haven’t gone back to the milkman. Refill my bottle, please. Don’t make it into a new one. Instead, we need to be shocked out of our recycling contentment and start undertaking real change. On a small scale, we should look to new consumption habits such as reusing bottles to contain oils, peanut butters, jellies, etc., contenting ourselves with tap or filtered water and Nalgenes rather than running to the Dasani machine or packing lunches in containers from home instead of buying a Styrofoam-swaddled pad Thai. Recycling encourages just the opposite. It’s the diet soda effect: you convince yourself that you are doing a favor to your waistline by drinking diet pop, and, thus, you give yourself license to drink it every day. Rolls of fat and a rotting smile later, you realize that self-control is better than artificial expedients. Such is the lesson writ large. We need to learn to moderate our actions, which are, at the moment, unsustainable. No matter how efficient recycling becomes, it is impossible that the energy it takes to mold car tires into suit jackets would ever be less than sewing that rubber sport coat yourself. Of course, I am not advocating such aberrant tailoring, but you get the point. Proud of our technological prowess in conquering the world, we have manufactured the idea that we can invent our way out of bad habits. But these will never be more than elaborate Band-Aids atop mortal injury. Perhaps one day we will become good enough to cure our afflictions with some neat, little machine ‘mdash; made by Apple, called iTrash and painted gunmetal ‘mdash; and that will be the point of no return. We will go head first into a Wall-E-like dystopia, and mankind will smile at its inventiveness. These things considered, I have nothing against recycling in itself. It is recycling as it is often seen that bothers me. As soon as we begin to reduce and reuse, recycling would be a fine addendum. Truthfully, I have nothing against recycling right now as long as we don’t forget that it is not enough. Recycling does not cork the flow of our waste production, it mildly throttles it. However, all is not awry. There are signs that the world is finally getting the message. Detergent manufacturers have started concentrating their solutions to reduce plastics, glass baby bottles are making a comeback and most supermarkets now offer reusable bags. Now we just have to actually use these products. We forget these bags and shy away from the extra weight in the baby pack for a glass container. Is recycling a step in the right direction? Sure. However, we must not become complacent, happy as we are with our repurposed, 20-percent, post-consumer feather in our hat. We must be sure not to take three steps back for every inch forward. Recycling is not enough ‘mdash; we must do more. E-mail Erik at ech15@pitt.edu.