By Bart King
News of a potential collapse in the U.S. recycling industry is beginning to spread.
The industry has enjoyed record-setting growth in the last five years, driven by rising commodity prices for oil and metals, as well as increased demand for post-consumer materials in China, where rubber and paper are given second lives as shoe soles, shower mats and packaging for thousands of other products manufactured in the country.
But as the effects of economic downturn have spread around the globe in recent months, demand for consumer goods has fallen and the bottom has dropped out of the market for oil and metals. As a result, the demand for recyclables is drying up.
The New York Times reported last week that scrap cardboard, plastic and metal are piling up across the nation. Recycling contractors are warehousing these materials, because they are either unable to find buyers or they hope prices will soon rebound.
Awareness is beginning to flow up the recycling stream to families and businesses who dutifully set their recycling bins curbside each week: recycling is driven by profit, not principle. And if municipalities begin directing cans and newspapers to the dump, I expect there will be widespread public outcry from the millions of Americans who count recycling as their #1 green undertaking.
It’s possible that enough support now exists that recycling could be decoupled from profit requirements through government subsidies. Perhaps then plastics collection could expand beyond the commonly accepted number 1’s and 2’s.
However, recycling isn’t the easy answer we’d like to believe it is—even if demand were to continue unabated. While it is certainly better than burying or burning everything and starting over with fresh resources, the truth is recycling requires a great deal of energy. The collection trucks and cargo ships that transport the materials from our driveways to China and the mechanical and chemical processes that break them down and then reformulate them require massive amounts of energy and emissions.
Hopefully the slowdown in the industry will force communities and society at large to look more closely and responsibly at waste and recycling streams.
For instance, in Athens, Georgia, where I live, the landfill is nearly full, causing the city council to renege on a promise made to nearby homeowners just a decade ago that the landfill would not be expanded. And this is despite an active recycling program that I’m told was state-of-the-art just a short while ago.
My knee-jerk reaction is that we are all consuming too much stuff—and this is at least partly true. But recently I’ve questioned this attitude, which invariably leads to a longing for the past when the world was populated by several billion fewer people—an outlook that is simply unrealistic.
Furthermore this attitude is too divisive, easily labeled as “green fascism” by people who automatically oppose environmentalism for political reasons. If sustainability is to become part of contemporary life, it must move with economic and human development, not against it.
President-elect Barack Obama is trying to sell the U.S. and the world on a plan for economic recovery and growth through clean energy development. The idea that society can continue to develop uninterrupted in this fashion, while lifting standards of living across the board is inspiring. But what about all the stuff?
Consuming goods and services, for better or worse, is the language of society. It is how we acquire food, water and shelter, and according to the United Nations Development Programme report titled “Consumption for Human Development,” it is necessary for the evolution of society and higher standards of living.
But where does that leave us? Buried in trash and recyclables, as the recent animated film Wall-E so brilliantly depicted?
What we need is a better-designed existence, as outlined by Michael Braungart and William McDonough in the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. The concept is also well illustrated by the documentary Waste=Food (currently available on Google Video).
In a cradle-to-cradle (C2C) manufacturing approach only two types of materials—or nutrients—are used. Technical nutrients are non-toxic synthetic materials that have no negative effects on the natural environment. These metals and plastics can be used in continuous cycles as the same product without losing their integrity—without being “downcycled” (what we currently call recycling) into lesser products and eventually waste.
The other materials are biological nutrients—organic materials that will decompose in any natural environment, feeding the small life forms that make for healthy soil. In this way resources are returned to the loop, and not just taken from it, thus doing away with much of the argument behind lowering consumption.
Significant advancements in the bio-based plastics industry still need to be made before I will be able to recycle a yogurt container in my backyard composter, but the know-how to design zero-waste products exists today. That knowledge just needs to be fast-tracked; it needs to be paid for.
Right now it’s cheaper to keep doing business the way it has always been done, creating massive waste streams. But market conditions are beginning to change that. Increased waste treatment and recycling costs will help compel businesses to redesign products and packaging to reduce waste. But a little market stimulus could go a long ways, too. Require companies to design sustainable products and you will create a void that only cradle-to-cradle knowledge can fill. Costs will go up, but with the right incentives in place, the money will flow, which as we’ve come to understand in recent weeks, is important to the stability of life as we know it.
Naturally we will need more university programs teaching sustainable design, chemistry and business practices. But if the lifecycle of every material is accounted for on the front end, there will be no back-end need for landfills and no confusion over what to do with mounting piles of devalued stuff.
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Bart King is News Editor of SustainableBusiness.com. This column is available for syndication.
Contact bart@sustainablebusiness.com.
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