Good Walls
How do we respond when a service we rely on goes away? Residents of Taos, New Mexico, faced that question in 2020 after the town announced that plastic recycling had become too expensive to continue. Taos isn’t alone; with China refusing to accept recycling from the US, and a waste transfer station in our own Antrim County closing because of unaffordability, recycling as we know it is in peril. As these services decline or disappear, what are our choices?
Additionally, the existence of operational recycling facilities doesn’t fix everything. Many plastics that qualify for recycling and even ones put in the recycling bin are not, due to limited capacities of facilities, unwashed materials, the cost involved and the lack of markets for recycled plastic. The buildup and storage of this recyclable waste material, along with all that couldn’t be recycled in the first place, leads to degraded land due to the leaching of microplastics. These microscopic bits of plastic persist in the soil and end up in food chains and aquifers. These sources of contamination in the United States have historically been concentrated in low-income areas, and in Black and brown communities in particular. This inequality is mirrored internationally as well. Plenty of waste, including recycling, ends up in impoverished nations that lack the infrastructure to manage it. These trends raise another question–even if recycling as we know it is available, is it our best choice?
With recycling services shut down and no conception of a responsible long-term solution, Taos families began stuffing their plastic into garbage bags and tossing them into their garages to sit. As the waste built up, members of the community met together to discuss alternatives, and an individual proposed a radical idea: using the waste to build — literally build — with. He had experimented with combining framing techniques used in seawalls and erosion barriers with compressed plastics, and thought that the town’s problem might show itself to be an opportunity.
Local organization TiLT (Taos Initiative for Life Together) took the project on and christened it the Repurposing Plastic Project. They began to accept the community’s rinsed plastics at a storage unit dropoff location, confirm they were dry and clean, and crush them under foot. They further compacted this material into infilling for walls — sixteen-foot-long cattle panels wrapped with chicken wire — by jumping up and down on it. These wall sections were then laid like giant bricks into a framed-in wooden structure, and then overlaid with stucco to prevent the exposure to sun and wind that would cause off-gassing. A traditional roof was added. The result: a simple toolshed that looked like any other adobe building. Word spread and not long after, the team was hired to build windbreaks, walls and benches at the local farmers’ market.
The Repurposing Plastic Project’s efforts continue today. They raised support to purchase a plastic baling machine, utility trailer, magnetic car door signs and to rent a billboard and location for the storage of the plastics. They have multiple drop-offs and have adopted a membership model–individuals and businesses pay a small monthly fee in order to drop off a set number of bags of plastic. Every Friday RPP hosts drop-in workdays, open to the community for work together in common cause, both baling and building.
The project does have limitations. People tend to think that the construction method is free or cheap because it reuses materials. It’s not. It’s slow work that takes many hands. The RPP website reminds visitors that the endeavor is “very part-time” and thanks them for their patience. Much of its draw is not due to its convenience, but the ethic behind it. Organizers believe that the initiative has merit beyond what can be seen in small projects.
We might consider other solutions to the problem of trash buildup. There are fixes that aim to prioritize scale, efficiency and cost, and transform the waste system as a whole through the application of money, technology and innovation. For those without adequate access to those resources (money, technology, innovation), the RPP presents a compelling model of community involvement, civic responsibility, and the scale necessary for an individual to comprehend. A person discovers that transforming their own waste into needed infrastructure gives them a sense of power. The work has its limitations, but, ideally, those might be akin to the best of limits that had kept humans’ impact upon the world somewhat in check for time immemorial.
In coming from the community, and being for the community, these walls are rooted in community values, some of which run deep in time. Ryno Herrera, one of the project’s lead organizers, has spoken of his work as connecting him to his ancestor’s knowledge of the land, as well as to the practices that preserved a healthy watershed for his generation. Herrera’s obligation, he says, is to continue those practices and provide the same inheritance for his children and grandchildren. This speaks not just to responsibility for place and each other, but to the way that we weave trust and a functional sense of community, both necessary for small places to thrive in the long haul. Wendell Berry lamented the atrophy of these connections in a 2013 speech: “The people in these towns and their tributary landscapes once were supported by their usefulness to one another. Now that mutual usefulness has been removed and the people relate to one another increasingly as random particles.” When we work together and when we create solutions together, we rebuild those bonds of usefulness and trust, while reshaping our towns.
The Repurposing Plastic Project’s first creations attempt to reverse the conundrum of how to stow plastics safely and responsibly. The toolshed and farmer’s market infrastructure are intended to limit the leaching and off-gassing of plastic waste. The projects also build camaraderie through shared and meaningful work. Plus, due to the nature of being a toolshed and the framework of a farmer’s market, they equip and support local food movements and community-scale solutions in long-term ways difficult to predict or quantify. These are systemic and powerful impacts.
This initiative is best viewed as a community working together resourcefully and responsibly to meet its needs with what’s available. Small-scale, low-tech, low-overhead replicability is intriguing, and slow, communally-minded work, rooted in place, is always needed. What can we do here? What’s worth doing? Let’s get to it!
