The Privilege of Recycling Righteousness

 Waste Hierarchy vs. Litter.  Keep Atlantic Beautiful.

There is a privileged disconnect between weathy nations' obsession with recycling rate of plastic, when the emergency is ocean-bound litter in emerging markets. I don't care if it's recycled, I want to see litter collected before monsoons send it to sea.

Visit WasteAid.org 

Over the past two decades, I've been delighted to see hunger decline globally, disease vaccination rates gain, mass communications tech spread across the poorest nations, and, quite significantly, the income per capita in so-called "third world" nations triple. Most scholars now refer to developing countries as "Emerging Markets" based on double-digit annual per income growth and spending.

Still, they have a ways to go. And environmentally speaking, many African, Asian and South American Communities are at the awkward stage of environmental regulation the USA saw in the 1950s and 1960s, when cars were dumped in American Rivers, and bottle bills were driven by LITTER, not by a heartfelt need to recycle.

There is a reverse normal curve when it comes to recycling and growth of income. Very poor nations recycle the most, because the value of the material is a high wage, they cannot afford to throw it away. In places like Kumasi, Ghana, the metals from cars are segregated into far more categories than an American recycler would ever bother to. 

But when the income of a nation doubles or triples, from very poor to modestly lower class, you start to see disposables being consumed - bottled water in Africa (or plastic bagged) - but not collected. The awkward period when - like my grandparents farm in the 1960s - garbage is being produced by higher and higher levels of packaging, but at best being burned in barrels, and at worst, dumped on roadsides.

And that's what is going on in Emerging Cities, many of which are on the coast, or along one of 7 rivers that dump into the 5 oceans.

Bagged Clean Water Seller, Agbogbloshie/Old Fadama slum

We can be happy that Africans can afford to buy clean water, or soda pop. But it's time to tackle their litter and conventional solid waste - especially ocean-bound plastic.

Eventually, if the nation reaches the wealth of the USA, Europe, etc., very expensive lined landfills and incinerators and collection contracts are funded. Then you wind up with the kind of debate I listened to this week on a competing THREE RECYCLING ZOOM CONFERENCES.... NERC.org, E-Scrap News, and Recycling Today all had competing virtual conferences this week.

No one talks about litter collection any more. Litter is SO 1970s. But millions of dollars are being spent on policies to increase recycled content, improve city recycling rates, and by all means necessary, to take material out of landfills and incinerators.

This is what I'm calling the Privilege of Recycling Righteousness. At the right of the income curve above, the wealthiest people are most afraid of - what? LIABILITY. LOSS OF PROPERTY VALUE. They can be NIMBY and at the same time spend millions of dollars to make sure it is not OUR plastic straw in that turtle's nose in the Ocean.

This is yet another opportunity for Fair Trade Waste Audits.  Notice I didn't say "recycling", as I've been branding the carbon-offset model for the past 6 years.

After my very first visit to Agbogbloshie in 2015, it was a hot day, and the Italian Documentary crew I was with (Jacopo Ottaviana's EWaste Republic team), Jacopo and cameraman Isaac Chiaff went with me for some cold drinks and fried chicken, in Accra's downtown (remarkably short distance from the scrapyard and slum, by the way). You can see in the photo, everyone gets a plastic bottled drink.

When disposable plastic bags and bottles are consumed by higher and higher percentages of the urban populace in emerging markets, it's a sign that fewer and fewer people in the country want a job separating scrap. Ghana is not yet there with metal, or repairable, they still excel at that level of recycling. But the value of mixed and foot-contaminated plastic is very low.

I did see plastic recycling in Ghana in 2015, but also saw people really struggling financially with it (as compared to electronics repair Tech-Sector jobs, which were a huge success). It is easy to "add value" - $500 dollars of it - in one hour of laptop or phone repair. It's easy to add $10 per hour at a job separating metals. But making a wage handling disposable plastic is not an attractive job to an increasingly employed, and secure, African workforce.

This is a call to fund litter collection in emerging markets, immediately.  Like, before the next monsoon or rainy season.

There is a new book coming out that I'm sure will explain the evolution of the inverse-normal curve, where a nation - China - has moved from recycling everything to not having labor to spare to sort its own waste, and it doesn't any longer want anyone else's.  Dr. Josh Goldstein of USC's book (which I have on backorder) comes out in December 2020. It's called "Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing". I really appreciated Adam Minter introducing us, and Josh working with Memorial U, MIT, PUCP, and others to create Discard Studies (which is hosting a Twitter Conference in November).

Here's what we have to do, now. There is a very huge, petrochemical-industry funded, $1.5 BILLION dollar fund, called Alliance To End Plastic Waste.

We have to restrain ourselves from wasting time debating "recycled plastic", EPR, packaging laws, and the like. Industry's response to complicated proposals is usually to set a "goal" in the future, which people will likely have forgotten about by then. 

The can - or plastic bottle - which we cannot so kick down the road is sitting in Accra, Douala, Lagos, Jakarta, Hanoi, Mumbai, in the ditch. Unlike the solid waste thrown on roadsides in the USA, this bottle is headed to the Ocean. We know when that will be - in the first heavy rainfall of the wet season.

All the plastic floating round in the ocean is not our plastic. People are making absurd claims, that USA MRFs are shipping bales of plastic overseas to be dumped in the ocean. Economically unfeasible, impossible, ridiculous. The Circular Economy, Copernicus may have noticed, does not revolve around the rich. Spending $10 to get one additional bottle from the City of Boston's curbside program (from solid waste into a recycling system) is far less important than spending $1 in a low wage country to get 10 bottles out of the urban gutter.

There are some organizations out there, like GIZ, WasteAid (see their photo capture of ocean-bound waste in Douala, Cameroon, where I was in 1986), and WR3A which are trying to balance recycling in a way to please wealthy nation donors. But what we all need isn't necessarily recycling, we need to offset Solid Waste in a carbon trading model. Get the bottles out of the gutter, sort them, and bury them for later. First, make sure plastic waste stops being ocean-bound. We'll get to the Perfect after we have accomplished something merely GOOD.

WR3A - crediting slum dwellers plastic recovery in Accra, 2015

Screenshot of WasteAid's Douala River slideshow, 2018.

Accra scrappers were struggling to find markets for TV plastic in 2015 (WR3A)