Do the Bins Keep Their Promises?

I stood in the garage and stared at the red, white and blue recycling overflowing in their place in the garage between my car and the garbage bin alongsidethe garage door.  Five plastic crates, two red, two white, one blue, are filled to the brim with leftover materials that Republic will haul off to the recycling center.  Not only are the crates themselves overflowing, but Whole Foods brown bags- four or five in total, are organized in two rows around them.  These bags overflow with plastic water bottles and juice bottles, plastic drinking cups and lettuce containers (we buy Butter lettuce that comes with the root still attached; that it comes in an eight-inch by six- inch plastic tub unnerves me), vegetables canned in tin, and plastic grocery bags.  I stare at the mess of clear plastic, cloudy plastic and colored plastic, sitting in painted plastic bins waiting to be hauled off to the recycling plant.

 I’ve done good, right?  My family and I have salvaged all of these things, saved them from a fate of a landfill where they will spend the next several centuries decomposing amongst every other kind of waste imaginable- food products, household items, electronics, cardboard, Styrofoam, and on and on.  I haven’t figured out how to avoid a life free of plastic, so in the mean time, I’m pleased that plastics are recyclable.  So I could view this miniature mountain of remains as a representation of a transition phase.  In a few days, a dedicated laborer will separate all these plastics and send them off down the conveyer belt to be crushed and melted and whatnot, to meet not an ultimate end but a new beginning in the form of freshly made-over plastic resources.  Then, it will all be sent away to reenter the cycle, right?

The process is of course a bit more complicated, and a little less optimistic.  At least, that’s what I read in a pamphlet in National Geographic.  Two pages were devoted to a graph of our resource use here in America and the percentage of those resources that go to landfills and those that are actually recycled.  Amongst things like food and paper, plastics was one of the most used resources, and even though some of us can place our plastics in a red bin to be collected once every other week, nearly seventy-five percent of plastics (according to this graph) still went into landfills.  A little blurb on the edge of the page said this: Because plastics are made from such a diverse range of materials it is oftentimes difficult to identify the exact components in a jug or a container or any other plastic item we wish to recycle.  Inability to identify components makes it more difficult to determine how to break it down for reuse. 

So I wonder, am I really recycling what I think I’m recycling?

My Mom had an interesting response: Why don’t we figure out a way to ensure that all plastics are made out of the same materials?  I’m no expert in plastic production but that doesn’t seem like a bad idea. 

I don’t know exactly how to fix this problem.  I just know that when I look at my garage, after reading the National Geographic last week I wasn’t quite as tickled at the good I was doing with recycling as I was two weeks ago.  I hope my contribution is a part of the twenty-five percent of plastics that are being recycled.  But that little tidbit in NatGeo urged me to realize that my contribution doesn’t always so easily fit into a labeled bin and end as soon as I take that bin to the curb.  Rather, I’m reminded that there is always room for improvement and to seek those improvements I mustn’t stop questioning and seeking answers and alternatives.  That’s the time to get creative and persist for clearly, there is no one, easy solution.  How do we get our centers to expand and take care of the broad range that plastics and recyclables require to actually be recycled?  Is it possible that one day all of our plastics will be made from the same components to improve the present poor percentage of plastics still entering landfills despite the hype around recycling? 

But it’s not just up to the big guys in charge of the actual recycling.  In the spirit of persistence, how do we not rely entirely on centers to make changes that will assist us in our protection of the environment and the natural world, but instead make changes in our own habits?  How do we get ourselves to reduce our use of plastic to avoid as much as possible our need for recycling in the first place?  When we must, can we stop and think how we could utilize all of it- plastic tubs, plastic bags, for other uses around the home?  I learned to knit recently and heard of a wonderful idea: you can knit with plastic.  That’s a great way to turn something disposable into something fresh and new.  And now, I’m about to get on the phone with my local recycling center, Nevada Republic Services,  to inquire about plastics with a number greater than two.  Where could I send them if not to our recycling center, and what would it take for the center to expand to accommodate plastics with those higher numbers?  These questions have no easy or quick-fix answers but I believe if we truly want to make an impact, we must keep challenging what we think we know and when we see an opportunity to demand more, we must ask those difficult questions because you never know when it could be the question that sparks a change, a transformation into something even better. 

As my Dad always says, ‘You don’t ask, you don’t get.’  So here’s to asking and here’s to perseverance and creativity for the getting.