Private recycling programs reflect a broken waste system
We can summon our collective will to solve our garbage problem
A few months ago, my family and I decided to subscribe to a private for-profit service that takes away hard-to-recycle products. For $15 a month, the company picks up plastic film, batteries, light bulls, textiles and other used goods from our doorstep and finds ways to repurpose or recycle them.
I’m lucky that we have the means and motivation. And while we are not 100% sure where these goods go, it offers us some peace of mind that we’re contributing in a small way to offsetting our waste in a responsible way.
But as I sift through our garbage to properly put all our pieces in the right bin (as little as possible for the landfill and the rest split between my municipal recycling and my pay-for service), I recognize just how broken our system is. This problem needs to be solved on a macro level, not by a spattering of individual action.
America is in the throes of a waste epidemic. Despite having just 4% of the planet’s population, the United States produces 12% of the world’s trash. We discard more than 292 million tons of municipal solid waste every year, according to recent data, which breaks down to about 4.9 pounds of trash per person per day. At the same time, the national recycling and composting rate is a paltry 32%, and, where I live in Colorado, the total is an even more woeful 15%, according to a recent report from COPIRG and Eco-Cycle. So, as much as my wife and I try to be accountable for our family’s waste, it feels like an insignificant drop in the bucket.
This is deeply troubling because along with clogging precious space with landfills, this waste damages the planet in so many other ways. For instance, garbage incineration, which is an alternative to landfills, causes air pollution, including the release of cancer-causing pollutants and metals and mercury, which impact brain functions. Beyond that, millions of tons of waste defile our oceans and other water sources.
In addition, approximately, 42% of America’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the lifecycle of goods — from extracting the resources and producing the products to transporting materials and disposing of the waste. This is playing a big role in our climate problems. The bottom line is we are too often poorly allocating precious natural resources to create things that we quickly discard.
Most people know some or all of this. In fact, the vast majority of Americans are asking for help to solve this problem. A poll earlier this year found that 73% of voters support creating laws that bolster recycling programs. The good news is there are ways to crack this that are vastly better than individuals shelling out $15 a month to take their minuscule slice of trash to a better home.
At the top of the list is instituting laws that make producers responsible for what happens to their packaging once it’s been used.
“Holding producers responsible for the waste they create can incentivize a shift to a circular economy — one in which less waste is produced, products are built to last and easy to repair, and remaining materials are recycled or composted,” Environment America Research & Policy Center explained in the 2020 report Break the Waste Cycle. “Such a system would create zero waste, eliminating the need for landfills and trash incinerators, conserving natural resources and reducing pollution.”
In July, Maine became the first state to enact a law of this kind. The law requires manufacturers to fund an organization to help limit waste and provides other incentives for companies to develop packaging that’s easier to reuse and recycle.
Another useful option is passing legislation that provides payment for the return of beverage containers (known as “deposit programs” or “bottle bills”). While 10 states currently have these laws, one study concluded that if we developed a successful national deposit program, 7.4 million tons of aluminum, plastic and glass containers that would otherwise end up in landfills would be recycled. The report also found that in a single year, this sort of system would lower greenhouse gas emissions by the carbon dioxide equivalent of 11.2 million metric tons, which is like taking some 2.4 million cars off the road annually.
Already, we have seen that if we create laws that push people in the right directions on this issue, good things happen.
For instance, a 10-cent fee on paper and plastic bags instituted in Denver in July was recently estimated to be on pace to lead to “a roughly 83% reduction in bag consumption citywide,” Axios Denver reported. Even better than fees, outlawing the use of single-use plastic bags can have a huge impact. For instance, after California instituted such a ban, 72% fewer of those containers were found during beach cleanups in 2017 compared to seven years earlier.
We have the answers to our waste problems. Rather than leaving people with no option but to go it alone with subscription waste removal, we must summon our collective will. With laws that push us in the right direction, we can reuse more, recycle only when needed and waste a whole lot less.
