Welcome to The Environmentalist, your column for understanding the natural world. Today we will be talking about recycling, its suspicious origins, and how we all bought one of the biggest lies of the century.
When I moved to Canada, I was struck with confusion the first time I saw so many different types of trash bins. Back home we only have one — maybe two, depending on location — one for organic and one for inorganic waste. The variety of trash bins in Canada has to do with recycling, but what exactly is that?
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines recycling as “the process of collecting and processing materials that would otherwise be thrown away as trash and turning them into new products.” Focus only on plastic for a moment: how much have you used and thrown away today? How much of it is near you? We cannot continue our lives pretending the more than two billion metric tonnes of waste generated worldwide every year disappears into thin air.
Here in Canada, only nine per cent of the three million tonnes of plastic waste that are thrown away get recycled. That doesn’t sound so bad, until you compare it to Germany — which has reached a total recycling rate of 71 per cent. We shouldn’t be asking ourselves how we can reach that recycling level, instead we should be asking: do we even want to recycle at all? The effectiveness of recycling has been questioned by experts who argue that the benefits of recycling are overstated. Recycling helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about three per cent, while reducing our consumption rate could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 20 per cent.
So why is recycling perceived as one of the main solutions to climate change? Recycling evolved and became more popular during the 90s when an increasing number of commercials and messages about recycling were released by the plastic industry. Even though they knew recycling hasn’t been economically viable since around 1974, they still spent millions telling people to do it.
There are multiple speculations on why they did this. According to CBC, recycling came as a result of the industry’s fear of a ban of plastics and as a strategy to better their image. ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies, and Chevron even formed The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) and still made 1,000 times more plastic than what they were able to clean up.
Recycling is far from being a solution to our waste problem, and with microplastics everywhere, we are in desperate need of a solution. The EPA defines recycling as the last resort after a product cannot be reduced or reused any further. We need to focus on reducing and reusing and other promising solutions like extended producer responsibility without forgetting responsible consumption — because if we won’t, who will?
Let’s not forget what The Lorax once said, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.” So, let’s care.
