Death of recycling
Recent headlines have announced the death of recycling. Since China stopped accepting almost all of our recycling, the value of recyclable materials has plummeted, leading many cities to close their recycling operations.
Recycling has been criticized as an occult practice that has little real environmental impact, and a recent article casts the recycling industry as a new form of colonialism. Many of us are familiar with the statistic that only 9% of plastic in the United States actually get recycled, and the thought that people in Malaysia and Vietnam live amid mountains of our trash turns the stomach.
You might say that our problem is that the rules of what can and cannot be recycled are too confusing. Maybe different sources have given you conflicting information. For instance, according to the Carton Council, aseptic containers are recyclable in Utah, but according to Lance Allen, program director of Salt Lake City’s Waste and Recycling Division, no facilities in Utah actually recycle them.
So should you recycle? My answer is an unequivocal “Yes.”
The resources of our planet are limited, and if we plan to continue producing and consuming commodities, recycling will have to be a central feature of the economy in the coming decades. It has to be part of our plan as a species to avoid the future portrayed in the Pixar film WALL-E, as the children I’ve spoken to in my role as a recycling educator for Salt Lake County understand.
But we also need to find a way for recycling to be something than other than a religion.
For many of us, recycling is a mystical and moral practice. You drop an aluminum can in the blue bin rather than the trash can and it, as if by magic, becomes something else, and you are somehow redeemed for your complicity in poisoning the planet.
Recycling is not a ritual but a complex economic and mechanical process, and understanding it requires some patience for tedious details.