My mother does not recycle. I was shocked when I found this out. She’d come out to visit us and put everything in the garbage can, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, junk mail, everything. I kept pointing her toward the recycling bin in the house and the big blue bin outside. But she insisted on putting everything in the garbage. I couldn’t figure it out. We had carefully recycled in the 1980s when refuse-sorting started, just like we started wearing seatbelts when the laws changed. So I finally had to ask.
“Oh, I don’t bother,” my mother said. “I’m convinced it all goes to the same place.”
Even for my mother, whom I’ve always considered just a little hippie crunchy, her answer seemed too much like she had subscribed to a wacky conspiracy theory. Then I started wondering: Where, exactly, does the stuff in the blue bin go?
According to various municipal websites, my stuff “may” end up in a lot of places. My plastic bottles may become playground equipment. My paper and cardboard may become gray cardboard or might just end up in the Far East. And if my castoff cheap Chinese goods are used in creating new, cheap Chinese goods, then hooray! The loop has been closed.
So, in essence, my mother is right. Except for aluminum, most of our “recycled” goods are “downcycled.” Old paper cannot be made into new paper of the same quality – trees are still felled at a startling rate for that snow white toilet paper we like so much.
All of those petroleum-based plastic bottles are not ground up and formed into new bottles. Instead, they are sold to commodities dealers who can, and possibly do, make them into something else (fake grass, anoraks – the websites proclaim). It’s not exactly recycling – but rather pushing used goods further down on the garbage chain – to eventually reach a landfill. Or, if we are unlucky, floating in the Pacific Ocean.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about stuff. Mostly because, after years of eschewing a lot of “stuff,” a baby has ushered in a new era of stuff in my house. No matter how I try to avoid it, this stuff, mostly of Chinese origin, some of it plastic, has crossed the threshold. I spend a lot of time fantasizing how I’m going to get it out of the house without needing my own landfill.
I can’t even escape stuff when I leave my house to avoid dealing with my own junk because I live in one of “those” neighborhoods. You’d recognize them at a glance. Expensive cars on the street – junk in the garage. Almost every weekend, during a long dog walk, my neighbors garages are open to my prying eyes. I am continually amazed by what I see.
Porsches, Mercedes, BMWs and Audis dot the street, many carefully covered in fitted grey plastic. My neighbors have devised elaborate car covers and window shades to protect their cars from the sun. The obvious cover, the one they make payments on every month, the built-in garage, is eschewed. Instead, unused treadmills, toys and clothes gunk up our lives.
Parting Is Such Sweet — What?
One neighbor with school-age children can’t seem to let go of the baby swing. Another neighbor who gets heavier and heavier keeps the unused treadmill in the middle of the garage. Others have shelves, bins and labels – but what’s obvious is that they can’t use and likely don’t need all of that stuff.
Stuff in our stores can be had for far too cheap a monetary price. Honestly, I can’t be the only one disgusted by this country’s endless displays of consumption. Just walking into big box house wares and electronics stores turns my stomach. A seemingly endless supply of plastic and metal gadgets is on display as if all those raw materials don’t have to come from somewhere. Then there’s the packaging on top of it. Unopenable clamshell packs, cellophane, cardboard surround the products to make them bigger, better looking, and more desirable. It often feels as if the packaging uses more energy and resources than the stuff inside.
Every time I see my neighbors dump bags full of packaging into their garbage bins, I can’t believe we live in a society where the manufacturers of these goods aren’t somehow responsible for the careful disposal of the same. Instead, we sign free trade agreements allowing corporations to exploit the natural resources of vulnerable countries, to hire workers at slave wages in yet other countries (and often even our own), and then dispose of them in huge landfills in our own backyard.
No Solution Within Reach
No amount of “recycling” can save us from a future where all of these externalities come home to roost. Like our big bank and auto bailouts – we’ve socialized the risk – the disposal of our junk – putting the burden on the taxpayer – while allowing corporations to rape our land and reap unfair profits from our hard-earned wages.
I don’t have an answer, but can clearly see that our current path on the road of consumption (and an economy based on it) is unsustainable.
So, again, the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I don’t have the same sense of self righteousness, I used to when filling up my blue bin, while leaving my black bin essentially empty every week.
My mother was right. It appears that it doesn’t make much difference if any one individual recycles or not. Kind of like how it makes no difference if I trade a fluorescent bulb for an incandescent one in a world where I can easily buy an SUV cheaper than a more fuel efficient vehicle, or hop on a gas guzzling plane for only a few bucks. The answer lies at the top of the product chain, not the end. Until our corporatist government gets off the so-called capitalist bandwagon – the solution is far off.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
