Recycling: The Gateway Drug

These days, everyone and their soccer mom (even mine!) is talking about climate change, and ways of reducing their environmental impact. What surprises me is that a lot of individuals, and some businesses I’ve researched for d2e, are extolling their recycling efforts, when recycling is one of least effectual ways of reducing environmental impact.

A friend of mine put it this way: “Recycling is the gateway drug.” It seems to be the first thing a lot of people focus on, but it introduces you to other hardcore habit-forming actions.

I first learned about recycling in a unit in elementary school, and went on a field trip to a landfill and recycling center where our trash ended up. My mom threw away one of my dolls, probably because I was bad or because of a recall, and I remember hoping I might find it and take it home (my fascination with trash rummaging continues to this day).

My interest in recycling resurfaced in middle school. Students often threw old quizzes and homework into the trash, when a blue recycling bin sat next to it, neglected, sometimes containing trash from the same careless students. It didn’t help that rumors went around the school that the janitors dumped everything into the same bin. Apparently that’s a common rumor in schools and offices, probably started when a janitor was forced to dump contaminated recycling into the trash.

In high school, I experiemented with new forms of action. I spent some of my 20-minute Thursday lunch breaks writing letters to the government and corporations to save whales, rainforests, and to deplore oil spills with other young impressionables like me, who loved monkeys, pandas, and dolphins. I wonder what happened to those letters . . . do you think they were recycled?

Sure, recycling is part of the solution. Giving plastic, glass, paper, and even aseptic containers a new life reduces the amount of space we need for landfills, the number of diesel garbage truck trips to landfills and incinerators, and the amount of new materials (whether mined or clearcut or cooked up in chem labs) and petroleum required to make new bottles and cans and catalogs we threw into the landfills or incinerated.

However, the amount of energy it takes to truck recyclables to recycling facilities, to melt plastic, glass, and rubber into new products, and to ship those products all over the world (China and India are huge purchasers of recycled paper) can result in a net zero savings in energy use and carbon emissions. When it comes to making changes in your life that will really benefit the environment, recycling is just the tip of the melting iceberg. Here's a heated discussion about this on Treehugger.

If recycling is the gateway drug, then I’m too far gone for rehab. Check out the recycling in my apartment . . .