Bashing Recycling for Confusion and Profit

The following essay is a work in progress. I invite all readers to give me criticism and direction.
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Recently, the ABC show, Good Morning America, ran a segment interviewing columnist and author Stephen Dubner (co-author of the book Freakonomics) on whether recycling works. You can watch it by clicking here. While Dubner's basic argument about recycling turns on the idea of market economics (which is sensible), he also says some really weird things that drew me back into the good old early 1990s when bashing recycling was the sport of kings.

In particular, Dubner says that plastic water bottle recycling doesn't make sense because it costs more to recycle water bottles (they aren't as valuable as aluminum cans) than it does to make new ones. He also says that old newspapers have such a low value that cities often simply landfill them after they go to the recycling center. He doesn't really provide us with any evidence. He just says these things as an "expert." Neither are true. Plastic bottles and newspapers have immense value these days. The real question is why they aren't being recycled more.

Bashing recycling as an odd form of entertainment and/or intellectual strutting crops up every few years. Before Dubner's mis-informed proclamations we had Penn & Teller really going to town on resource recovery in the second season of their Showtime series, Bullshit! In a nutshell, they put words in recycling experts' mouthes and then "disproved" them by having other experts say things like: "It's just not true that recycling saves money." These "experts" for the most part are funded and employed by fringe conservative think tanks who few people could call adequately informed or objective.

The episode is actually worth watching no matter what your thoughts on the matter. It is entertaining and informative in a twisted way and Penn Jillette's use of curse words is right up there with Eddie Murphy and Bob Saget. But the method they use to supposedly debunk recycling is truly bizarre.

The Mother of All Critics
Way back in 1996, columnist John Tierney published a notorious essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine called "Recycling is Garbage." Although there have always been recycling bashers (rag picking and scrap handling used to be the job of immigrants, after all, and who better to bash than those who handle our waste and clean up after the rest of us?), Tierney's piece was seminal in that it carried the authority of the nation's top newspaper and it was highly detailed in its analysis of recycling as consumer behavior, attempting to sound as if the author was smarter than every environmentalist and do-good liberal in America.

"Recycling is Garbage" demonstrated a phenomenal lack of sophistication by its author, focusing primarily on household waste diversion in the New York City area at a time when the city had profoundly cheap landfill costs and was simply dumping its trash in the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Several years later the city closed Fresh Kills, trash costs tripled, and the economics of throwing things away got a bit more complicated.

Simultaneously, Tierney, like every other idiot who claims they know the "truth" about recycling, was actually only talking about residential recycling, a completely different beast than commercial and institutional recycling (read, recycling at work). Rest assured, if someone makes no distinction between recycling at home and recycling and work and says "recycling this" and "recycling that," they don't know what they're talking about. In actuality, about 60% of the trash generated in the average urban area in America is from offices, institutions, and other commercial enterprises; and much of that material is mixed paper and cardboard -- very valuable if collected properly.

An Anthropology of Waste
Tierney's, Dubner's and Penn & Teller's odd little exercises in self-appointed debunkerrhea point up a very important aspect about waste that has been at play since the beginning of this country: for the most part, human beings find it very difficult to think rationally about stuff they feel has no value.

The American way of life is based on a deep and rich value system that exalts the economy of goods and consumer satisfaction. More than any other country in the world, the U.S. social system bolsters these values -- materialism -- through the elaborate philosophies of free market enterprise and capitalism. At the core of this set of philosophies is the idea of reason and rational decision making. As such, the American economy, and by extension all of American society, can be successful if and only if the logic of the free market is allowed to prevail. The effect of these philosophies is all too apparent in every shopping mall, business district, and neighborhood of this country. Strict adherence to a rational free market may carry many unwanted side-effects, but there is no denying that it is at the center of our nation's history from start to finish...it is, indeed, the reason that we fought for our independence some 230 years ago. Life is good because of all this stuff we possess and want to possess. Our stuff is evidence of our culture, pure and simple.

What then of waste? Waste is certainly a cultural item. It is a category into which a material good is placed that renders it useless. Waste is something that an individual or group of individuals (e.g., an institution or industry) deems valueless. What we do when we take a plastic package or a used cigarette lighter or a cardboard box is "throw it away." The item goes from having use and value and meaning into a bin or black plastic bag. It has been discarded. It is trash. Rubbish. As such, by moving something from the sphere of reasoned economic utility into the land of Away, that thing moves from the realm of the rational into the realm of the irrational. Through what may essentially be called a process of negative definition, waste is something that we willingly place outside the realm of the rational free market.

Nothingness and Danger
In a very real sense, waste and garbage are part of a much broader category of things that also includes dirt, pollution, disease and putrescibles like animal feces, sewage, and -- perhaps the most abhorrent substance known to puritan America -- human waste. All of these items carry with them varying levels of aversion. Besides being outside our rational cultural classification systems, they present us with a multiplicity of emotional responses combining the notions of danger, impurity and even taboo.

In her book, Purity and Danger, the great anthropologist Mary Douglas (who died this spring) presents interesting, pan-cultural examples of these emotional responses. But she also points out that a by-product of these "impure" categories is the creation of a boundary that separates order from disorder. Of dirt, she writes: "Dirt is essentially disorder… it exists in the eye of the beholder… In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying, we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea." A few pages later, Douglas writes: "Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to dis-order, form to formlessness, life to death."

The implications of all this should be self-evident. Recycling, as a system for taking stuff that has historically been deemed outside of our system of order -- stuff that is valueless and impure -- and reconstituting it into something that can be re-inserted into our system of order, runs against deep cultural constructions. Recycling in all its complicated facets, is an attempt by some of us to inject meaning, value and rationality into the realm of Nothingness and Danger that is waste. This is no easy task. It should not be surprising then that confusion and irrational responses would find their way into the public discourse on waste management options. By mandating recycling governments across the country essentially seemed to be regulating a very fundamental and personal combination of thought processes and behaviors.

And free marketeers are not the only ones guilty of irrational thinking about recycling. Environmentalists and recycling advocates can also fall into the bucket of emotion and unreasoned policy framing: issues of convenience, personal hygiene, public safety, and economic efficiency often take a back seat to recycling advocacy; proven enhancements to recycling programs like single-stream processing, incentive-based recycling systems like RecycleBank, and expanded bottle bills have all met with a great deal of skepticism and even hostility from the mainstream recycling community. In addition, within the world of environmental advocacy, large-scale media attacks on corporations like Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and Apple Computer have been successful media ploys but they often don't address underlying problems like consumer demand for cheap and convenient products -- and the broader spectrum of the complicated and crazy lives that Americans lead.

The point here is not to trash recycling advocates or opportunistic journalists and free marketeers. The point is to make clear that the cultural implications of recycling (and waste management in general) represent a dynamic and shifting boundary for what is part of our ordered existence and what we define as outside of order (disorder). We should, in fact, expect irrational discourse on both sides of this issue.

In some ways it is possible to make the claim that recycling is a major revolution in one of the more fundamental and core components of culture. What is being questioned is the very notion of what is Real and what is Not Real. We are at play with the nuts and bolts of meaning in our consumer society. Recycling represents as much an obsession with materialism as does consumer culture and the profusion of disposable products that got their start in the middle of the 20th century.

In fact, using the logic above, recycling becomes a kind of canary in the coal mine and can tell us something very important about the direction public discourse is moving with respect to environmentalism. While much of what environmentalists are concerned about is the stuff that is cognitively relegated to the realm of the impure -- disease, pollution, toxins -- environmentalists are also concerned with the notion that extracting natural resources from wilderness areas (destroying the beauty of nature in the process) in order to produce resources for manufacturing material goods is not necessary. These two realms of concern are either part of our reality or part of the nether world of danger. As a liminal concept, recyclables are actually in both worlds. Recycling is both pure and dangerous. It is part of the Real and part of the Not Real. Conceptually, then, recycling is vulnerable to critique and confusion. It also has the potential to instigate emotional and magical notions of grandeur and moral superiority.

We need to watch out when recycling is attacked. It is the easy target. Destruction of beauty, dominance of nature, and the danger of toxins, disease and pollution carry more valance and charge.

Environmentalism today is once again a goose laying golden eggs. If I use the word "sustainability," people's pleasure zones light up. If I use the words "renewable energy," readers or listeners will pay attention and nod in the affirmative. But for how long? Let's take a look at the early days of bashing recycling.

Early Signs of Castration and Magical Thinking
Taken on cultural terms, what is going on with those who seek to bash recycling (residential recycling, anyway) is not so much rational thought or even moral logic as evidence of confusion -- a challenge to what they seem to take as the common wisdom of market-speak and the hardcore reality of old-school materialism (do not forget that media is one of the biggest purveyors of meaning and order in our society and that newspapers are in many ways the heart of urban curbside recovery programs).

We first began to see signs of recycling's curious place in the American Experience during the final year of the TV show Cheers. Shelley Long, in the character of Diane, tries to explain why the novel she left Sam Malone for never got published, whining something like: "I even wrote it on recycled paper!" It was the whining -- pathetic, oozing, a combined little girl contriteness mixed with moral twittery. I remember thinking: "Okay, here we go."

Around that time, 1992, the short-lived "environmentally-friendly renaissance" was coming to an end. Folks were beginning to forget the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Mobro trash barge, Philadephia's incinerator ash barge, the Khian Sea, and the massive environmental disasters in Bhopal, India and Chernobyl. Those few words spoken by Shelley Long on a sit-com were surely meant to illuminate Diane Chambers' effete, self-absorbed magical thought processes, but at the same time it showed that recycling had attained a level of cultural relativism, and, by association, that it had become the province of effete, self-absorbed, magical thinking liberals everywhere. (ouch!)

By the time the show aired, Reader's Digest, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal were lambasting government waste diversion programs everywhere. And as the '90s cruised along, numerous anti-environmental and anti-liberal publications and organizations went after recycling with addled glee. It was almost as if headlines like Recycling is Garbage, What a Waste, Recycler's Talking Trash, were just too enticing to not find some kind of copy for.

And there was rather deep truth to some of the criticism. Somehow recycling became for a while there the focal point of the media's idea of ecology and consumer environmental behavior. Critics charged, in essence, that recycling wasn't a panacea after all and that the religious zeal with which it was being taken had become anti-market, anti-consumer, and anti-American.

Environmental advocates were accused of acting as if recycling was going to save the world, when there was so much evidence to the contrary (i.e., it's expensive, inconvenient, creates more environmental problems than it solves, and is just plain environmentally inconsequential). The truth, of course, is that recycling is simply one new piece of a sustainable economic future (post-materialist) that we're trying to build here, and that we have a long way to go before technology, commerce, and social mores align properly for things to work efficiently.

Dusting Off Old Arguments
Since Tierney's pinnacle tirade, things have changed -- Penn, Teller, and Dubner not withstanding -- in the world of waste because of climate science. Green is back. It took a great deal of work, but through the efforts of scientists, non-American politicians (and one retired American one), some of the top economists in the world, and a few intrepid journalists and writers, the proposition that climate change is in large part out of control because of human endeavor has brought back concern for how the industrial world interacts with Nature.

Green has been a theme of media (that and the insanity going on in the Middle East) from the end of 2006 and all of 2007 so far. Energy, of course, is now the main focus, but on the grand stage where hype and sound bite govern who gets to use the megaphone, "environmental stuff" in general is all the rage.

In America, however, most everything that seems to be on the side of The Good is fair game after a year or so of worship. Additionally, with Democrats getting much of the credit for "environmental stuff," as election '08 rolls towards us, you can be sure that the anti-environmental arguments (especially against recycling) will be dusted off again and again (dare I say, they will be recycled?).

It is the dusting off thing that we need to watch out for. Most everything in the environmental world has changed in the past four to five years. If you were paying attention, you might recall that Environmentalism died in late 2004. Solar, wind, and energy conservation technologies have improved dramatically over the past decade. Even more important, with the rise in oil, natural gas and electricity costs, investment dollars are now flowing into renewable technologies. Companies like Tesla Motors, Vestas Wind Systems, and HelioVolt Corporation, are creating surprising products. And what of Wal-Mart's use of their deep pockets and negotiating savvy to push issues like compact fluorescent lighting on pretty much all shoppers in America? Environmental stuff isn't really about nature anymore, it's about life in the human world. It's not even really about solving problems, so much as coming up with better, cleaner, more effective ways to do things.

The question is whether the critics really understand these changes, or whether they are simply going to use the arguments of days gone by to make tired, old statements of disapproval about a world that inevitably must change.

It's Just Business
With all due respect to Mssrs. Tierney, Jillette, Teller, and Dubner, a decade or so ago, the economics of recovered newspaper and plastic bottles was indeed marginal and exceedingly complex. The pulp industry was very whacky back then due to foreign competition and low demand for recycled content; and plastics were extremely hard to collect and process because technology had not advanced enough. These economic equations were made all the more complicated as well because landfill prices were relatively low (in NYC especially) and oil was still relatively cheap.

But today’s world is completely different. China is driving recycling markets for practically all materials. Commodity prices for recyclables are higher and have been relatively stable for several years now. Landfill fees are also up, meaning that the cost of disposal is becoming harder and harder for municipalities and businesses to pay without seeking alternatives. And oil prices are through the roof, making energy-intensive raw material extraction and conversion more costly – and making the cost of trucking material to landfills and incinerators more expensive as well.

In addition, recycling collection and processing technologies have gone through two generations of change since Mr. Tierney’s article was first published. So-called single-stream processing is now the norm, and while not perfect, has truly reduced collection costs for municipalities and also allows processors to handle far more material at a relatively fixed cost, giving their businesses a better margin through economies of scale.

Similarly, end-use industries in North America, particularly the paper industry, have re-tooled to incorporate recycling more effectively and minimize contaminants. There have also been tremendous advances in recycled product applications over the past decade – from fleece fibers to tissue and box-board to crumb rubber, glass cullet, automobile steel, and printing and writing papers. Many recycled products are now better, cheaper, and more marketable than they were a decade ago (go check out Staples and compare the cost of their recycled copy paper to non-recycled).

Are things perfect? Of course not. The point is that this industry, if we can call it that, is still growing and changing and developing. All this despite massive subsidies and protection by federal and state government for the virgin resource extraction sectors of the economy. What we've been up to with recycling over the past 20 years is the first tentative steps toward investing in an infrastructure that reflects the ideals of efficiency and minimal harm to the planet. We have also been investing in the concrete and material representations (special trucks, blue separation bins, processing facilities, recycled products) of the belief at least some hold that discards shouldn't necessarily be relegated to the Land of Away. The operating term here is "investment" -- spending money today, committing ourselves, making the effort to bring about serious cultural change both in the real world and in the world of the mind.

When solid waste planners look at the real economics of trash vs. recycling these days they find that recycling is often the better option in many cities throughout the country. Indeed, the true and obvious arbiter in all of this is the marketplace. Paper and plastic are certainly highly sought commodities in many large urban centers and recycling companies are willing to compete to obtain this material.

In Philadelphia, for instance, the city receives $24 a ton for its paper, bottles and cans from a local processor. Factoring in the avoided disposal fee of $65 a ton, this is a swing value of $89 per ton. The main problem is collections. Single-stream makes it theoretically possible to collect recyclables at roughly the same cost as trash collection, however only about 30% of the city’s households regularly put material out for recycling. This is Philadelphia's big conundrum. With only 1 in 3 houses on any given street recycling, the cost of truck and crew time is inefficient.

There are many, many reasons for this lack of participation. One of them, of course, is people’s quick willingness to take the thoughts of anyone who says recycling isn’t cost effective (or environmentally effective) and use them as a justification for not recycling. That’s kind of what Dubner and Penn & Teller give people in their televised pulpits, and it’s certainly what Mr. Tierney did with his "Recycling is Garbage" piece. Are they pandering to cognitive dissonance, or are they looking to speak the truth? Who knows?

I’m not saying recycling is the solution to a disposable world. But without doubt, continuing to send trees, metal ore, and petroleum, etc. to landfills rather than capturing them as urban ore and reconstituting them into products that are economically sound and clearly marketable makes very little sense – especially when you take into account the future of this country’s economy ten and twenty years out as energy costs continue to rise and new landfills must be sited further and further away from urban centers.

What we’re trying to do is build a new kind of economy here. We’re trying to build it for the future. Analyzing recycling from a single frame of time (and using ideas from ten years ago) certainly isn't very thoughtful. Hopefully, over the next few years all of the big meanies out there will see that it's all just business and maybe come out and talk to those of us doing the policy, planning, and coordinating work – and those buying, processing, and selling recycled commodities. It’s a weird field, but it’s also very interesting being on the cutting edge while being so close to the beast's magnificent belly -- or should I say sphincter?