Overconsumption, the Importance of Reducing, and the Relative Worth of Recycling

Where our garbage goes is not something many think about on a day to day basis. We all know it goes to landfills but ultimately, many have the misconception that once it's put out on the street, it's out of our lives and gone forever. This is similarly true for recycling. Many people see recycling as a way for them to save the earth without putting much effort into it, or they don’t consider the amount of trash they generate and don’t recycle because it feels like too much effort. Overconsumption is a huge problem in developed, industrialized, consumeristic societies such as America. Our huge two story houses, lavish furniture, cars for each person in the family, air conditioners, refrigerators, stoves, electricity, showers, lawn hoses, toilets, and washing machines contribute to a huge energy expenditure and air pollution each day that we probably don’t even realize. Add to this our solid waste - the wrappers, food containers, paper plates, and other scraps of waste that we accumulate each day.

Compared to this, recycling seems almost insignificant. And to some degree, it is. We must first focus on reducing and reusing, before we even get to recycling. Trying not to get into the “really fancy two-story house” rut to begin with is somewhere to start. I’ve seen some of the mansions in Los Altos Hills, and really, they’re almost disgusting. Usually it’s a small family of 3, 4, or 5, living with multiple staircases, a pool, two garages, and in at least one case a theater. If everyone in the world, including third world countries where the people there are lucky if they have a roof over their heads, lived the way we in America do, we could not possibly sustain our way of life. The problem is, even the tips I give on another part of the site, and are really only helping put a slight decease in our huge dent in the environment, even if everyone abided by them. If we hope to increase the standard of living on a global scale, we must drastically reduce our consumption and learn to live within our means.

So why then do we recycle? The bottom line is that recycling at least makes more use of our waste before we throw it away, and is usually more economical to use to make products than virgin materials. We can save resources, money, and energy by making more use of our products before they go permanently to sit in a landfill for thousands of years taking forever to biodegrade.

There are some critics of recycling, but mainly because you can find statistics for anything you want to argue by not taking into account all variables, and because frankly, they want an excuse to not to sort through their trash. You have to be wary of anything you read, because you’re likely to find this sort of thing going on. You can argue, for instance, that it takes more energy to make recycled paper from pulp. What the anti-recyclers will not mention is that this is without taking into account all the tree cutting and harvesting to make the tree into paper pulp.

There is certainly a problem with the lack of efficiency of recycling in some areas. But the key thing to remember here is that each area is different. This is also because the US has no national program and recycling is left up to the states, which have varying levels of participation. Many of the anti-recyclers will pick up on recycling programs that fail because they were too expensive or too hard to keep up. But abolishing recycling programs is the wrong solution to this problem. This “something doesn’t work, let’s just give up” kind of attitude is unfortunately present in many more places than just recycling. In the early days of recycling, they were expensive and hard to keep up simply because they were new and the technologies had not all been created and perfected to higher efficiency. Then there’s the matter of collection and distribution, a whole new hassle to coordinate and address. And then the part of recycling most people forget - the part that completes the cycle, buying recycled products. It’s hard for a recycling plant to stay in business when no one buys its products. But hey, we built the Panama Canal, and that failed on the first try. We can set up and maintain adequate and efficient recycling centers - even if it takes many years to get going.

Some anti-recycling campaigns are actually funded by packaging and landfill companies, because they want to stay in business. In some places, landfills can actually lose money if something is recycled - because of the way we have to pay per pound or per trash can, and recycling is free - and as we know, with many businesses, making money is more important than adhering to environmental regulations, so they will try to decrease recycling for their own short-term gains. Many anti-recyclers cannot think in the broader terms of long term versus short term gains, and this is another thing they choose to ignore when making their arguments.

Another common argument is that landfills create jobs, and can increase revenue for an town or city. Yes, landfills do create jobs, but recycling centers create more jobs. This is logical because there is just more processing involved with breaking down and then making new stuff. If the anti-recyclers are really concerned with the amount of jobs created by waste management - which I don’t think is really that many, compared to other venues - then they shouldn’t mind that recycling programs are expensive. And yet, we see this an argument we see a lot, ignoring that garbage collection also is quite expensive. And while having a landfill may increase revenue for a city - this is often a last resort, and done because the region is poor, economically depressed, and has no other choice as a means to get money. Plus, who wants to live near a landfill? The “not in my backyard” slogan is there for a reason - by putting a landfill in your town, you are decreasing the likelihood that people will want to move there.

But don’t take statistics or even recycling success stories at their word. Remember, everyone trying to argue their point will hope that you skip over some of their slightly flawed logic. I saw too many pro-recyclers mention the decrease in the number of landfills as a way to show recycling levels improving. There are indeed fewer landfills; the difference is that they are much bigger landfills, and so really we are disposing of the same amount of trash.

Lastly, I would like to address the depressing tendency of people to expand to fill their container. In the perceived garbage crisis of the 1980s - which wasn’t really, but the media played it up as such - people became afraid, and starting to reduce their garbage and participate in recycling programs. However, now that the “garbage crisis” is over and we are entering a new generation, our rates of recycling have dropped and our garbage amount has increased. Unless we can decide that the future is important to us now - without needing a crisis to motivate us - we will never be able to reverse the current trend of being an overly consumeristic, non-earth friendly society, and as more people are able to participate in the developed world, this will only increase.