The recycler’s dilemma
We can all do our best to reduce, reuse and recycle, but our culture, economy and politics don’t make it as easy as it should be.
My mom bought one of those giant Costco pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving dinner. The dozen of us who assembled at our Thanksgiving feast ate some of it. But the pies are big enough to feed a pro football team. Unless you invite NFL players to your holiday meal, to finish a pie before it goes bad, you need to re-invite everyone you had over for Thanksgiving every night for the next week for dessert.
About two weeks later, I stuffed the remaining, souring pie into the garbage disposal and ground it up into minute particles. Afterward, this food-encrusted pie tray and cover awaited its fate:
In most places, you can’t recycle materials with food residue caked on it, and even if you want to reuse them, you have to clean them so they don’t breed germs. I then faced the recycler’s dilemma: Do I throw out the recyclable metal tray and plastic cover, or do I use copious water to wash them thoroughly enough to recycle or reuse? Which of those is less bad for the environment?
This isn’t just a holiday feast dilemma. It happens every day, like it did with my yummy yogurt at a typical breakfast:
This situation was much easier to resolve in my mind, since it required so little water. But the question re-emerged — should I waste water or add to landfills where my trash will feed rodents and pathogens and add to our environmental and public health problems?
The short answer is experts say you should wash out the containers, since they don’t require a thorough washing, and rinsing only uses up a small portion of the energy saved by recycling.
But we shouldn’t have to waste any energy (or water) at all. There’s a reason that the “3 Rs” go in the order “reduce, reuse and recycle.” We, and people and companies everywhere, should always try to minimize the amount of materials we’re creating. Producing packaging wastes a lot of water well before you use it. The more we reduce the amount of “stuff” in the world, much of which is single-use, disposable and largely unnecessary, the less we’ll need to reuse or recycle things — let alone dispose of them in landfills.
That brings me to “reuse,” which, when it comes to many of the food-residue-laden materials we have, could mean “compost,” if you’re savvy enough to compost in your yard. In some places, recycling companies also collect compost (do your research). But not enough Americans have access to composting. U.S. PIRG recently noted that:
Most Americans do not have curbside compost, even though more than 30 percent of household waste — including food waste, yard waste and most contaminated paper products — is compostable. Composted organic waste is a nutrient-rich resource for gardens, parks, and open spaces. Composting can also curb greenhouse gas emissions from landfills.
Reusing food waste, contaminated paper products, and contaminated compostable bioplastics would significantly reduce the amount of refuse destined for landfills — or destined for recycling, yet ending up in landfills.
While I don’t want to discourage people from recycling, and I’m an ardent recycler myself (despite my score of only 71 on this quiz), once we get to that third “R,” we’ve missed out on the most impactful opportunities to protect our environment.
Therein lies the problem: The recycler’s dilemma shouldn’t exist in the first place. Even the most motivated individuals can’t make the large-scale impacts required for substantive change on their own. That’s why Environment America and U.S. PIRG — through, respectively, the Wildlife Over Waste campaign and the Stop Trashing Our Future campaign — have called for bans on single-use polystyrene, and other plastics.
We also need large corporations to take responsibility for their contributions to the waste stream. Companies from Starbucks to Hyatt to American Airlines have all taken a first step, committing to eliminate plastic straws. But if companies won’t mitigate their adverse effects on our environment on their own, we need government action.
Every little action counts. With that in mind, I’ll keep rinsing my recyclables and putting them in the blue bin, while realizing that it’s incumbent upon all of us to (1) minimize the amount of packaging we go through and (2) find better ways to make sure we’re composting.
Those decisions are as easy as pie.
