Social Strata Recycling: It's the Recycling Economy Stupid

 While I'm certainly not a fan of communism or any system that concentrates authority in a smaller number of bullyboy hands, I do respect Karl Marx's economic theories. Compound interest rewards those who save - who tend to be those ABLE to save.  If you are born to slaves or paupers, and have no choice but to lift your bucket where it is and lift as you climb, you are extremely unlikely to become self-made in a single generation.

It's the Recycling Economy Stupid.

That said, teaching people that it is hopeless to lift their buckets as they climb is cruel and unusual, historically speaking. The empowerment of resentment - Marx's elixer for proletariat revolution - has little evidence of building wealth in society at large. Most people benefit from a smaller slice of a bigger pie than taking away another person's piece and re-distributing it among sharp elbowed bullies.

So one of my fascinations is how different portions of society define, practice, and promote "recycling". I'm back in Barcelona, again observing the shopping-cart-men (and it has been exclusively men, over the years). Mostly black men, but not exclusively. Somewhere I have a photo of a white man in Paris whacking off the copper yoke from a computer monitor left on the sidewalk (he saw me filming him with my Palm OS phone, and crossed the street waving the hammer at me - but then realized I was filming his threat and thought better of it).  It was equal to the famous Jim Puckett (film major) photograph of the Asian woman whacking off the copper yoke of a monitor somewhere in China. I also observed it in Singapore (non-OECD control group, richer than USA but racially profiled as "primitive" by OECD definers in authority).

• The informal sector is efficient. They do not pick up plastic litter, unless there is a container deposit attached, or unless they are incentivized (like Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud's ENPROSA Action) to do so. An aluminum can will never be thrown away in a very poor country.  And that is a beautiful example of capitalism correctly prioritizing environmental protection.  

• The do-gooder sector is less efficient. In societies which are wealthy enoug to feel guilty, or where we prefer shiny consciences to the guilt we bear over our massive consumption of earth's resources, either everything must get recycled or we go crazy.  The plastic film which is unacceptable in a blue box (not because it is "unrecyclable" but because the labor saving mechanical devices at the MRFs become entangled with the bag waste) has become a shrill, distracting sense of outrage now completely engulfing California recycling policy.  

When the blog was visiting island recycling in Puerto Rico in December, a search of Google Maps opened dozens of scrap metal yards paying for cans and pieces of scrap metal and wire - the same kinds of buyers profiled in Wondergam's "Scrap Metal Men" in Agbogbloshie, or pushing the shopping carts down the posh avenues of Barcelona, Spain. But despite not needing Do Gooders / Environmental Justice Warriors - or perhaps BECAUSE of not needing them - it's dismissed.  Regularly the metal recycling societies are described as "informal" or "no recycling infrastructure".  Those societies ecause they don't have high enough newspaper readership to make public paper bins work (they are always filled with trash, even at USA recycling conferences I've attended), and plastic has never had the true cost of extraction attached to it so scrap cannot compete with subsidized virgin material.

The subsidy programs - like my nemesis, The Mining Act of 1872 - subsidize everyone already living at the cost of everyone yet to be born in the future. Metal mining remains so costly in energy and carbon that it succeeds especially in the poorest tiers of society.

When my recycling company is profitable, we are able to do more things and invest in people and equipment that recycle more efficiently. My company recycling trucks are really behaving like push cart scrappers. When people are wealthy enough to pay us to take things that we'd take for free, if not but for the raw material subsidies, it's a way of paying future generations back for the mess we are leaving them with. 

#theperfectistheenemyofthegood has been a theme since 2006, the year I saw the Singapore scrap metal man whacking off the copper yoke - the year before 2007, when I observed the middle aged white Parisian doing the exact same thing. Both acts looked shameful to me because they were at odds with the economics of recycling the leaded glass CRT tube, as Jim Puckett had made the Asian woman seem shameful. But in each case, throwing the monitor away with the copper yoke still attached and not recycled would have been worse, and my privilege may have been at odds with the best interests of future generations. 

Feel like I'm diving too deep here. I have to give this a pause. But for the record, I like communists. I just don't trust them to design a "circular economy" based upon the weight of wastes in landfills. Landfills aren't closed because they are too heavy, they are closed over toxicity or lack of three dimensional space where real estate values are high (and are impacted by NIMBY). The highest and best use systems are repair and reuse, and future generations will probably care as much about the systems being created (firmware obsolescence) to "brick" working devices than they will care whether copper was recoved by hand via a hammer or by an automated shredder.