"Like A Band-Aid On Gangrene"
EDITOR’S NOTE: This edition of The Heat Beat was originally published on 6/19/2019. To receive future editions for FREE, smash that there button, wouldja?
TOPLINE
Recycling doesn't necessarily help fight pollution, climate change
90% of plastic not recycled, much of rest isn't actually recycled anyway
2019 plastic over lifetime = ~189 coal plants worth of CO2
Maj. corporations fund "greenwashing" to make you feel like plastic is your fault
ACTION: Don't give up, get wise with the actions below (none are donations this time!)
Was just up in Nantucket this past weekend. First time. You ever been? Me either. Nice place, if you can get there (and afford it.) Anyway, the house I was staying at had a rule: if we improperly discarded recyclable materials in the trash, we would be fined $150 per item.
We were pretty careful about which bin we tossed our beer cans and Solo cups into that weekend. 150 bones is a lotta bones, after all. But beyond the penalty, you can see the virtue, right? Nantucket is a pristine island enclave, and to keep it that way, everyone has to pitch in—even the shitheads there for the weekend bachelor party.
ACK (this is what they all call the island, on account of its airport code; it’s fine, I guess) has had a mandatory recycling program since 1996. In 2009, it boasted the nation’s highest recycling rate at 92%. Few communities across the country take recycling as seriously as Nantucket, but it’s not for a lack of effort. Since the ‘70s, recycling has been relentlessly promoted across the country as a civic responsibility and a moral imperative. If you don’t put that bottle in the big blue bin, the premise goes, you’re a bad person.
There are a bunch of problems with this, and I’ll get into them in a moment. But first, the big one. Household recycling is not a solution for the world’s pollution, and it’s not working. Even if we all recycled 100% of appropriate materials, there’s simply nowhere for it to go. At its rosiest, recycling is a lightweight tool in the conservationist’s toolbox. In the cold glare of reality, it’s more “like a Band-Aid on gangrene.” But if recycling can’t save us... well, then what?
The Problems With Plastic
We recycle cardboard, metal, glass, and plastic (plus a bunch of other stuff I’m probably forgetting) but for the sake of not boring the shit out of you/myself, let’s just focus on plastic for this go. OK? OK. We know that single-use plastics—straws, water bottles, shopping bags, etc.— are bad for the environment because they kill wildlife, contaminate food, and never really disappear. You’ve probably seen That Turtle Video, and/or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch mentioned in one of your social media feeds. Stuff like that has gone viral, and rightly so, because they’re graphic depictions of what happens when we prioritize human convenience over everything else. It’s a bummer, to be sure.
But experts say mankind’s “plastic addiction” is also hastening global warming in ways that are less visible but way more pressing. Obviously, the fact that virtually all plastics are made from petrochemicals spells trouble. But we’ve known that for a long time, whereas we just recently learned that plastics emit greenhouse gases like methane as they degrade in sunlight. (Methane is about 84x as greenhouse-y as CO2.) Another report found that throughout its lifecycle, the world’s plastic generates as much CO2 as 189 coal plants, and projected that figure to more than triple by 2050.
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Recycling: A Plastic Pipe Dream
Despite all of the downsides, plastics are undeniably useful in applications from medicine, to food service, toMean Girls. (Movie jokes!) No surprise then, that we’ve been reluctant to go cold-turkey. Recycling has been held out as a middle path: a way to blunt plastics’ environmental impacts without giving up the benefits they’ve granted society. In theory, if we could repurpose every shred of plastic currently in existence, without producing any more, this might work. But with over 90% of plastics going unrecycled, the US recycling rate pegged at around 34% (fairly butt compared to the rest of the developed world; see chart), and China refusing to take more scrap plastic, this is basically a pipe dream. A plastic one, I guess.
Instead of waiting for serendipity to deliver us the technology, culture shift, and geopolitical will it would require to make recycling viable, scientists have a much simpler strategy: cut off the source. Considering just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of carbon emissions (all carbon emissions), it’s not that hard to figure out where to aim. We’d have a way better shot attacking plastics from the top down, goes the logic, rather than the ground up. “It's the cessation of production that will make the big-scale changes,” said the Band-Aid/gangrene researcher. “Your consumer behaviors do not matter, not on the scale of the problem.”
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Keep America Beautiful (And Corporations Blameless)
In other words, no matter how many restaurants swear off straws and how faithfully you separate your various recyclables, nothing will stop the global flow of plastic besides… well, stopping it. But if individual recycling efforts are to climate change what “hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper”, then why do we all do it—or feel so damn guilty when we don’t?
This is not a coincidence. Not in the US, at least. Starting in the ‘50s, major corporations (Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Phillip Morris, and other totally trustworthy stewards of American wellbeing) started framing pollution as the moral failure of bad-apple customers, rather than the obvious outcome of, y’know, manufacturing and selling shitloads of plastic. This was the era of “throwaway living”, when the idea of single-use plastics was being touted as man’s great, lucrative triumph. Keep America Beautiful (the org) “managed to shift the entire debate about America’s garbage problem”. It coined the modern concept of littering, created the notorious “Crying Indian” ad, and bamboozled generations of Americans into thinking that they were the problem. KAB is still around, and is now considered by critics to be one of the first examples of “corporate greenwashing” (an environmental misdirection for industry’s benefit.)
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Recycle?
This all feels like it’s pointing towards a big ol’ action that says “don’t recycle.” Depending on where you live, it truly might not make a difference. Even if you put it in the right bin, there’s a good chance it will actually just go to a landfill on the other side of the world anyway. What’s the point?
Whether you keep recycling or not is up to you. Try to cut out using plastics when you can, and don’t let the shame of dumping your bottle in the wrong bin let you lose sight of the fight at hand. When you do that, you’re “carrying the guilt of the oil and gas industry’s crimes,” wrote one environmentalist recently. “That blame paves the road to apathy, which can really seal our doom.”
So no, don’t abandon hope. Just stop using that energy to shame yourself. And on the flip side, don’t disillusion yourself into thinking that spending a hungover morning properly sorting Coors Light cans at your Nantucket rental house is the… wait for it… silver bullet (!!!!!!!) that will solve the climate crisis. Instead, try one/several of these handy actions! Onward.
ACTIONS
Take the 4Rs pledge and try to live by it in your day-to-day life.
Sign the petition asking corporations to stop plastic pollution, then call your lawmakers and ask what they’re doing about it.
Start your own fundraiser for 5Gyres, a non-profit that leads ocean clean-up projects.
Learn how to pitch your local officials on a plastic bag ban at supermarkets in your community.