"If everyone would just recycle one more used bicycle tire a year, we could save the Perito Moreno Glacier and the Dragon of Patagonia stonefly wouldn't go extinct." I jest, but this is the sort of argument that shows up for environmental causes all the time. The idea of everyone doing just a little bit is very attractive. It doesn't seem to be that onerous and look at the wonderful benefits! When I pointed out to my brother that mandatory recycling is a kind of forced labor, he rolled his eyes. I see his point. Most things are pretty simple. You throw it into Bin A instead of Bin B. Maybe you have to rinse it out. Maybe you have to check the little markings to see if it is eligible for your local recycling. Societal shaming if you won't do that little thing is the way we have always operated in any culture. Show up for church Christmas and Easter, it won't kill you. Wipe your feet before entering to save the hostess some work. Buy whatever the cub scouts are selling this year, it's good for the town.
The reason people like this is because it scales up! If we could find 350M more bicycle tires to recycle, it would make a difference.
You know what else scales up? The things that you ask people to do. Over the course of the week, mandatory recycling in my house adds up to less than half an hour. Wait a minute, breaking down the corrugated cardboard and taking those to the dump takes more than that. And when we've got more cardboard than usual, that starts to add up. As the amount of required time and effort increases, people start to question what it is all about. So this plastic won't break down for 10,000 years? Do I even care about the landfill a hundred years from now all that much? Shaming me by calling me short-sighted and not caring about posterity might set me off on a rant about the national debt ten years from now. You don't care about the fact that your grandchildren are going to have to deal with that with major lifestyle changes? Oh, you don't even have any grandchildren? So no problem, then, right? Go back to worrying about plastic in 10,000 years.
What's the tipping point on cultural changes? There are lots more children born into single-parent families now. Is that worse than plastics? Am I allowed to think it's worse than plastics or carbon fuels?
8 comments:
Recycling can be worse than that. They want you to scrub off the labels. Try sometime. Some are trivial, others need razor scraping--think how much water you're using in the process.
When the recycling program was first started in my town, the town was very strict about what you had to do and how you had to do it. Many fines were assessed for failure to comply. But eventually the town discovered that the program was just too difficult to enforce, and that it was losing money. Now they hardly enforce compliance at all, and just ship everything collected to some southeast Asian country that does all the sorting and washing, etc. Bureaucratic inertia can be your best friend, sometimes.
I don't bother with recycling anymore. I don't generate enough trash to fill up the regular garbage can every week. It would take me a year to fill the recycle bin with the few items that are recyclable here and I'm not about to waste water washing those. There is also the fact in this locality (publicized and acknowledged) that the recycle bins are sometimes taken to the landfill with household garbage.
I remember trying to argue with a friend that washing plastics out with hot water and soap probably uses more resources than just landfilling it. It was hopeless, because she just couldn't grasp the concept that there were tradeoffs to everything, and it isn't always easy to calculate which way the balance goes. Our schools are letting us down.
Do I sense this post was not really about recycling?
True enough, but you see, there was this squirrel...
Legitimately about recycling as a lead-in to discussing many things government asks us to do.
No recyclying in this county. A neighbor dutifully drives her recycling to Austin. I learned not to try to tell her that the places taking in glass were probably just ditching it, as the Asian countries who used to receive it had given up on it as a bad business.
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