You can’t swing a cat in UFV without hitting a row of receptacles. You’ve got a place for your organics to keep that compostable goodness out of the landfills; recycling bins for your mixed plastics or refundable items; and a lowly trash bin for the few remaining items bound for the dump. Fuck you, trash can. We don’t need you anymore. I’m not convinced.
On numerous occasions, I’ve witnessed UFV’s hard-working custodial staff dump the contents of a recycling bin into the garbage and then take out the trash like it’s all the same. In their defence, it probably is. Recycling culture isn’t new, especially in the Pacific Northwest, and most of the student population has been raised in it. Everyone knows you can’t just discard your plastic poke bowl into your blue bin — you must rinse it so the recycling doesn’t become contaminated — but without convenient wash stations at school, what’s a student to do?
When I attended high school back in the ?90s, I turned my youthful exuberance toward noble ends. I joined a school organization called the Teen Environmental Awareness Movement (TEAM). The whole exercise was met with such derision by my peers that I fled the group of thrift-shop Planeteers after a year. Back then, it was a struggle to get people to not throw their Fruit Roll-Up wrappers on the ground, let alone dutifully sort their rubbish.
It took barely a generation for our recycling mindset to radically change. We now expect to find recycling bins when we’re out and about. When I went to Kauai in 2016, I began to question my sanity when I failed to find a place in the airport to deposit my empty soda bottle and was eventually informed by staff that there was no such receptacle there. It was like going back in time. How could a tropical paradise be so behind the times, I thought! Maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were just honest.
Canada’s federal government reports that only nine per cent of plastic is actually recycled each year. In the U.S. that number is five per cent — and falling. We think we’re doing the right things, which gives us license to consume more. It’s all a lie. Even if the first 99 people are careful and diligent about what they put in a UFV blue bin, all it takes is one half-drunk Iced Capp to ruin the whole lot. Even UFV’s own 2019 waste audit shows that recycling contamination is greater than the district average for home pickups which is already too high. With that in mind, why would UFV’s janitorial staff not just assume everything is contaminated as they make their rounds to the hundreds of bins spread around the campus? Four options. One destination.
We want to do the right thing — and we want to be seen to be doing the right thing. I get why UFV has lined the corridors with bins. They provide the optics of sustainability the university surely desires — and we want to see it — but it’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s a performance of progress that’s done little more than litter the halls of education with empty gestures.
Long ago, when DeLoreans roamed the earth, Brad was born. In accordance with the times, he was raised in the wild every afternoon and weekend until dusk, never becoming so feral that he neglected to rewind his VHS rentals. His historical focus has assured him that civilization peaked with The Simpsons in the mid 90s. When not disappointing his parents, Brad spends his time with his dogs, regretting he didn’t learn typing in high school.
