America Recycles...or does it?

Nest, sheathed in plastic

 Today, apparently, is America Recycles Day, a day to celebrate recycling and its importance.After several years of picking up trash along the Greenway, I see firsthand how many plastic bottles and aluminum cans find their way into the low-lying cells. How many plastic bags shred and linger among the stems, some finding their way into bird nests and squirrel dreys. How much cardboard somehow flings itself through the neighborhood to land in the Greenway. The styrofoam containers and packing materials that disintegrate into smaller and smaller bits when you try to grab them.. The building materials from nearby developments that miss their dumpster and end up as litter.

Recycling is important, no doubt. We are fortunate that our city has a robust single-stream curbside recycling program that makes it easy for residents to participate, for the reasonable cost of $6 a month (since 2016, apartments are required to provide recycling services to their residents as well). 

We all know how important it is to Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. Today is celebrating the last or those activities. What about the first one? Why do we end up with so many single-use plastic containers? Does everything we buy need to be wrapped in a sheet of plastic? What about all those plastic grocery bags? So many of these items can't be recycled even if we wanted to. What happens to them?

Think about every fast food meal, with its waxy-coated cup, plastic lid and straw, sometimes with plastic utensils and plastic-sheathed condiment packets. Think about every box shipped from an online retailer, with its air-filled plastic cushions and protective plastic bags around the contents. Think about the frozen foods you buy: frozen pizzas wrapped in plastic, frozen vegetables in their thick plastic bags. 

Is all this really necessary? Who handles the disposal of all the plastic and other materials that can't be recycled? Our municipalities, funded via fees and taxes from us. Who handled the disposal of all the recyclable materials? Our municipalities, funded via fees and taxes from us. Who creates all the waste in the first place? Industry looking for the cheapest possible packaging to maximize their profits. Note they don't cover the costs to dispose of that packaging--we do. It is no concern to them where the packaging ends up. They aren't walking our trails and picking up trash along our Greenway. We are. 

What can be done to stem the tide of single-use materials? The first step is electing leaders who understand it is a problem and prioritize working to correct it via a kind of "producer responsibility" bill. Manufacturers should think about their products from production to disposal, and include the costs of that entire process up front, rather than offloading to municipalities. If the cost to collect and recycle those single-use plastic bottles was included in the cost of those cases of flimsy bulk-purchased water bottles, maybe people would find it more cost-effective to use their own reusable bottles. Maybe if the cost to capture and recycle those styrofoam take-out containers was included in the purchase price, restaurants would find the biodegradable alternatives didn't seem quite as expensive in comparison.

Yes, recycling is wonderful. When it is available and cost-effective. But we need to shift to a mindset of responsibility to the people who actually create the waste--manufacturers and industry. As long as we allow taxpayers and fee-payers to subsidize these cheap, single-use plastics and packaging materials, we are going to continue seeing them produced, and continue finding them places they shouldn't end up. Like our Greenway.