The Whistle of a Distant Train

Being the environmentally minded person in my cohort, I have always had an interest in the politics of waste. It is my view that somewhere in our course of American history, we lost our pragamatic and conservative consumption practices and instead supplanted them with the reckless and irresponsible culture we have today. To give you an idea of how different our culture is today from the past, here is illustration.

In the early 1900's, King Camp Gillette invented the disposable safety razor. There was initially a muted acceptance to the product's introduction. People were wary about anything "disposable", and people already owned straight razors that could be resharpened ... so why would they agree to continually purchase new sets of razor blades? WWI largely provided the stimulus for the spread of the disposable razor, as it was issued to all American forces. The degree of convenience during wartime overtook the conventionally pragmatic culture of the day, and as troops returned from war, they spread the idea that the convenience of a disposable product outweighed the merits of saving money.

In the larger context, the acceptance of disposability has lead to considerable amounts of solid waste being generated. But people seem to be jumping on board the recycling bandwagon as environmental consciousness becomes the vogue. But recycling is as much a false idol as the biblical golden calf. Sure recycling can help reduce the amount of resource extraction required to maintain our current consumption practices, but overall its simply a delaying mechanism for the inevitable final discard.

Each time a bottle or can is "recycled", the material becomes a lower grade material and must be supplanted with newly extracted material or must be made into a lower grade material that can be used in an application that uses a coarser material. The belief that all those bottles and cans thrown in recycling bins are directly returned to bottling plants and remanufactured into equivalent numbers of bottles and cans is simply untrue. Perhaps the operative term here is remanufacturing. Somewhere along the line the vernacular has been twisted and we have described our waste disposal programs as "recycling", but what we are doing does not particularly fit that definition.

The term "recycle" at least infers that we are taking a consumer product and reusing it for its intended purpose (hence a cycle). When you buy an Aquafina bottle, and then proceed to refill that bottle with tap water (thats all Aquafina is anyway; label says "public source water supply") then you are recycling in the truest sense of the word. When you take that same bottle and place it in the recycling bin, it goes to a processing plant where it is deconstructed into into small plastic chips, ready to be reformed into some type of product, thus you are remanufacturing. In addition to the detriment of the perception of the "green" nature of recycling, an enormous amount of energy is required to deconstruct recycled materials and then melt or shape them into their subsequent forms. As a large portion of America's energy demand is met by coal fired power plants, recycling contributes to air pollution and global climate change.

The more I shop (particularly at grocery stores) the more alarmed I am to see the amount of packaging and the durability of the containers that are used in retail food sales. I bought a $2.50 gallon of Arizona Green Tea that came in a jug that was thicker and more durable than the "permanent" water container I owned to hold water for my camping trips (purchased at REI for $7 no less). I'm glad to report that the Green Tea jug is now a permanent fixture in my camping equipment, which leads me to another point... people have lost their creativity and sensibility for reusing materials.

I remember growing up, I would visit my grandfather in Missouri. He had a AMC Eagle (Google it) which he would work on from time to time. I remembered one particular instance in which he had to add some coolant to the car, so he took a milk jug out of the garbage and cut off most of the bottom with a pocketknife. He flipped it upside down and voila! A funnel. I must have been only like 8 years old, but I never had thought of the jug being anything other than a milk jug. When he was done, he put it in the corner of the garage (didn't throw away) to use again. To this day, it perplexes me that people buy funnels at auto parts stores... just buy a Coke and you have both a Coke and a funnel.

But reuse can only take us so far. In the end, municipal recycling programs are only a delaying mechanism and despite our best intentions, recycling does not stop post consumer waste from ending up in landfills. If you are truly trying to reduce your impact, buy a nice water bottle and refill it often. Not only will you save hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of dollars on products you do not need to buy (contrary to popular belief, there wasn't always bottled water for sale), but you will be making a real impact on reducing your impact on the environment. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle..... with an emphasis on reduce and reuse!

PS - Check out Chris Jordan's environmental art (particularly "Running the Numbers"). It really makes you think about the magnitude of the waste we generate.