“But I recycle!” No you don’t.

LISTEN above, or read below . . .

Ah, a new year, a new chapter. I mean that literally, of course. I just finished the Waste chapter for my book — it came in at 30 pages, or 9,909 words. (Although she still doesn’t have a title.)

Why don’t I drop an EXCERPT of it here? I’ll update you on other adventures after that. Here goes . . .

If you’ve ever met me, you’ll know that waste is my pet issue. I love to hate waste. I can’t stand single-use plastic, from grocery bags to bottled water to those little green plastic harpoons with the Starbucks mermaid on ’em made for sticking into the hole of the (plastic) Starbucks lid to prevent the steam from coming out while you carry your coffee around like an Hermes bag. I’m also tired of talking about it.

Unless you get me started.

When I began blogging about my environmental adventures, and doing shows about it, people would often ask me about recycling. “Is this recyclable?” “Is that?” “What about these?” (The latter whilst they held up, say, a pair of worn-out flip-flops.) And they continue to ask me about it. “You write about the environment? Can I recycle this [plastic fork / bubble wrap / broken coffee mug . . . ]?

Let me respond with a little story.

In the early 1970s, there was a TV commercial that became kind of famous. It’s known as the “crying Indian” ad. An Italian-American actor portraying an American Indian (long braids, fringed buckskin ensemble) paddles his canoe down a beautiful river . . . and is met with floating garbage and smokestacks huffing along the shores. He winds up on the side of a noisy freeway (no idea), where an oblivious driver tosses a bag of trash at his feet. A tear glistens down the “Indian’s” leathered cheek. A voiceover ends the spot in a Dragnet monotone: “People start pollution. People can stop it.”

It’s one of the biggest advertising scams ever. Know who produced it? The freaking polluters.

See, twenty years earlier — in the 1950s — a couple of big beverage and packaging manufacturers were getting worried that all the single-use bottles and cans they were releasing into the world were attracting too much attention by the government. Lawmakers were starting to talk — about banning the production of “throwaway bottles” (back when bipartisan lawmakers agreed on things like that). So the beverage and packaging companies anonymously formed a little group they euphemistically called “Keep America Beautiful,” and started an ad campaign featuring a Caucasian girl named Susan Spotless who tells people, “Don’t be a litter bug!” Effectively creating the narrative that all that trash was the consumers’ fault, not the producers’. And the lawmakers shut up.

But meanwhile an environerd named Rachel Carson — a writer and “junior aquatic biologist” for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries — saw something fishy happening with the birds. She learned that the chemical pesticide DDT (which was the new “insect bomb” being sprayed all over creation) was to blame, and she wrote a very readable book about it, called Silent Spring. Published in 1962, it led to the banning of DDT, and pretty much launched the environmental movement. The chemical companies, of course, hated it. (But she’s one of my heroes, obv.)

So now it’s the 1970s. The environmental movement was on fire at this point. Silent Spring had been a MASSIVE hit, altering the course of history. People were protesting big plastic, the first Earth Day was held, and — thanks in big part to Carson’s book — the Environmental Protection Agency was created (by Richard Nixon of all people) to regulate corporations and keep them from poisoning folks who were just trynna live their lives. Native American culture was also super-hot. So, to fight back this time, the “Keep America Beautiful” group (i.e., corporate front) invented the aforementioned “Indian” and his canoe. Or, ya know, they hired an ad agency to do it. “People start pollution. People can stop it.” It’s on you, folks. Keep America Beautiful. Again, they deflected the attention from manufacturers onto the public, and continued to produce even more environmentally unfriendly stuff.

“But I recycle!” you say. First of all, you don’t recycle. You put stuff in a bin that then leaves your house for who knows where. Just like you (and I) do with our trash.

Actual size.

And we think we’re helping by doing that, because polluters also used the idea of recycling for their propaganda. Telling consumers to “Recycle!” was another way for corporations to deflect responsibility for actually making something that takes 100 years to break down but has the sole purpose of holding a single serving of soda that takes 10 minutes to drink. And that’s because, after World War II, American manufacturers who were switching back to making consumer goods figured out that the only way to make a decent profit was to produce things that immediately turned into trash. Stuff that lasted too long . . . lasted too long. Then they brainwashed us. “Use as much plastic as you want — just recycle it!” So we bought even more plastic. And then companies started bottling and selling something we could all get for free out of our own faucets: water. And then just for shits & giggles, they started making smaller and smaller plastic bottles to hold the free water — like one measuring cup full of water in a cute little bottle labeled “Poland Spring,” wherever that is.

(It’s actually in Maine. We’ll deal with them in the Water Chapter.)

Oh, but they did make the screw-top caps smaller at one point, so they could say their bottles were “now made with less plastic!” The bad news is that these new tiny caps take the skin off unsuspecting thumbs whenever you try to unscrew them. And they’re not even recyclable, like the bottles themselves are (with caveats).

Anyway, all that early corporate greenwashing explains a lot about how we got into this (literal) mess. Because here’s where we find ourselves now — and don’t get me wrong, I’m as guilty as you are. I work in advertising. I’ve helped sell soda in plastic bottles, and tampons with plastic applicators. I basically am the bad guy. Because here’s what’s up.

At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy-theorist, don’t believe them.

Since machine recycling became a thing (about 40 years ago — the same timeframe as that TV commercial), less than 10% of all the plastic that’s ever been manufactured has actually been recycled. According to a Greenpeace report from October 2022 (which is like an hour ago in scientific reports), roughly 6% of post-consumer plastics in the U.S. are getting recycled today. And if you’re someone who thinks a Greenpeace report might be a little biased, let me say that even according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — during the Trump era, no less — just 8.4% of our plastic waste in 2017 was recycled.

That leaves over NINETY PERCENT of our plastic waste hanging out somewhere — including most of the stuff that’s been put into “recycling” bins. Blueberry containers (whose contents, incidentally, might have been shipped all the way from South America — can you say “carbon footprint”?), Chobani yogurt flip-cups, the clear bins that your micro lettuces come in . . . end up getting burned, stuck in a landfill, and/or floating around in the Great Pacific Gyre, that continent-sized whirlpool of laundry detergent caps, plastic forks and the microbeads from our facial scrubs.

On top of that, we’ve been exporting a third of our recyclables (20 million tons a year, whatever that looks like) and paying countries like China to deal with it for us. Until 2019, that is, when China was like, “Yeaaaah, we’re gonna stop taking that stuff.” (Rumor has it that our recyclables were just too contaminated with our food waste — leading these foreign companies to either dump them or burn them — but it also could’ve been that we really suck at separating the recyclables from the non-recyclables, and were just sending them everything all mixed together.) Malaysia said they were even going to return our plastic to us — dunno if they did, but if so, then carbon emissions from not one but TWO overseas shipments (there and back) were generated. Oh, goodie.

And all of this meant that tons of American cities had to shut down their recycling collection programs, because there was no place to send the stuff. Some places — like my little town — are still collecting recyclables on garbage day, but then have to send it to landfills. I got this info straight from the best source in town when I first moved here (from the big city) in early 2020, days before the Covid lockdown . . .

Next: One sip of water.

Let’s end the excerpt there, since the next bit appears in another blog post. Read that one HERE if you missed it. And I’ve got an excerpt from the Climate chapter HERE, in case you missed that a few months back.

And speaking of past posts, remember the last one, wherein I went bike riding in Japan? Well, the big earthquake that just happened over there is EXACTLY where we were: the Noto Peninsula. Below is our guide Nick showing us the route one morning — that’s the Noto Peninsula pictured behind him.

We started the ride that day where Nick’s head is, biked around the peninsula’s perimeter, and finished where he’s pointing. Much of it is now rubble. 😦

For reference, the big map above is represented in that tiny little red area in the map of Japan below. I mean, what are the chances?

(stolen from the NYTimes)

It’s weird, right? Especially for a California girl who grew up with earthquakes, and very clearly remembers being tossed around by the Northridge Quake in 1994, which was 6.7 in magnitude, and devastating. The earthquake in Japan yesterday was a 7.2. I hope all the nice people we met are okay.

Ya know, it’s January 2nd now, New Year’s Day is over, so I’m gonna sign off here. If you’re feeling the New Year spirit, subscribe to this blog (below). And/or listen to the audio (above) — both help other people find me. You can also leave a comment below. Tell me, for example, do you recycle? 😉

xo,
Deb