Honeycan Recycling Method 102: It is often not a yes/no (Recyclable/Non) Question - but WHY

"Honey, Can I Recycle This?" Part 2

Follow up lesson from HoneyCan Method 101

We constantly see two bins for our discards: one labeled "trash" and another "recycling." In cities like Barcelona (my second domicile), there are multiple bins. Two are intended for trash—one small round litter bin on the street corner and one large dumpster, lifted and emptied by a truck, which should probably take only bagged trash. Four are for recycling. Paper, Compost, and Glass are fairly obvious (though each produces its own "HoneyCan" questions). Then there are the carters - the same as the Irish and Russian Jewish immigrants to USA cities, who push carts up and down the city streets collecting scrap metal (and electronics).  Those will be the subject of another blog.

The most confusing one for my Ph.D. spouse is the yellow "container" bin, which accepts both metal and plastic packaging. And most of her questions are about plastic.

Often, when she asks me about a plastic container—say, a yogurt cup whose mouth is wider than its base—I consider three explanations.

1) Appeal to Authority. Whatever the Barcelona recycling webpage says, do that. Someone else has already made the decision, and neither of us needs to understand why.

2) Prioritize. What is the worst outcome of getting it wrong? What happens if we mistakenly recycle something that shouldn't be recycled, versus mistakenly throwing away something that could have been?

3) Simplify. If I want her—and millions of other people—to recycle with confidence, perhaps the technically perfect answer doesn't matter very much. Give participants rules that don't discourage them from doing the things with the greatest positive impact.

And... did I say just three explanations?

4) Pontificate. Give her a firehose of information about the history of natural-resource consumption, commodity markets, MRF technology, mining, international trade, and their implications for the future of the planet and human society.

Longtime readers of this blog already know which one I'm naturally inclined to choose. My wife just wants to know where to put the yogurt cup.

In Honeycan Blog 1, I emphasized the second response:  Prioritize.  Triage. The aluminum can is always more important than 100 yogurt cups.

One concern I've seen is that professional recyclers and policy wonks are so damned concerned about the recyclable claims about plastic, and whether chasing arrows belong on a yogurt or cottage cheese package, that they are willing to sacrifice #3, the simple, to critize #1, the authority, to claim that plastic recycling in general is some kind of a scam. 

Whole books are written around that premise, marketed to readers already primed for the confirmation bias. My wife reads plenty. She isn't going to buy a gotcha journalist's book about plastic packaging. But she is absorbing the ambient message, and feeling some unnecessary guilt about the plastic container her yogurt comes in.

I tell her: It isn't that important. The question is why that is the packaging used for that product, and why we should recycle the packaging.

I tell her that plastic is a better way to preserve, deliver, and package yogurt than putting that yogurt or cottage cheese in an aluminum or steel can or a paper (probably plastic lined) container, or in most cities, glass (where the glass is commingled by color and not truly recycled back into glass... if you cannot source-separate the glass by color, its theoretical superiority vanishes).

De-simplifying recycling by making it a subject of gotcha (gotcha on exports, gotcha on marketability, gotcha on microplastics) is the worst place to go. It creates cognitive dissonance (long a subject of retroworks blogs) and discourages people, and then fewer people feel as good as they should about all the aluminum cans they might have recycled.

In the photo taken yesterday, my wife (environmental advocate, non-expert) turns right, the scrap metal collector with the cart, turns left. The carter might be an environmentalist, but I suspect is responding to the free market purchasing the scrap he's picked up from the construction sites and home relocations. He probably recycles for his economic interest, and would never bend over for a plastic yogurt container. My wife has no financial interest, but she can learn a lesson from the carter's priorities.  Ramasser les dechets d’aluminium.

This goes back to the blog's thesis that the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) was about landfills - not about their weight, but their contribution to groundwater contamination in populated places.  The greater threat to water is the extraction industry - mining, fracking, mono forestry - which too often extracts raw materials without royalties or remediation costs.

The more direct route to recycling is an MBA, not photojournalism.