Thoughts on Garbage & Recycling

Fascinating discussion on garbage and recycling policy featured on the Tuesday, February 21 episode of the Diane Rehm Show. The takeaway: the U.S. is falling behind other OECD nations in the scope and effectiveness of our recycling policies. Emerging as the most ecologically sound solution are policies that seek to transfer responsibility for disposal of consumed products from the taxpayer onto product producers. In broader terms, a shift is required from the current "cradle to grave" approach of manufacturing and disposal to a "cradle to cradle" approach that reuses discarded products and components thereof in lieu of landfill disposal.

Allen Hershkowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council:
"[Japan and Europe] limit the amount of material that goes to landfill. They have landfill taxes...[and] a policy called producer responsibility which requires the consumer products companies to help pay for the infrastructure to collect the material and send it to a recycling facility. Right now, municipal waste is [entirely] financed by taxpayers or consumers...Producer responsibility rationalizes the price signals, and helps support municipal programs financially and directs more material to recycling."

"[The Japanese] prohibit the deposit into landfills of certain types of plastics and paper. Their bottles are standardized size so that they could be refilled. They combine deposit laws with producer responsibility laws with bans of certain material going to landfills."

Another innovative solution are "bottle bills", as currently exist in 10 U.S. states. In my personal experience as a native Michigander - home of the 10 cent deposit* - I can attest to bottle bills' efficacy in commodifying waste. Discarded beverage containers that would be litter elsewhere possessed economic value and were likely to be retrieved by enterprising individuals with free time, and redeemed for cash value.** Samantha McBride, author of Recycling Reconsidered:

"[Under bottle bills] the consumer [returns] the container to the point of purchase...it maintains its economic value. And research has shown very high rates of [recycling] -- much higher than in curbside recycling scenarios...[If] we could promote a national bottle bill and extend it to more plastics and glass container we could have a very different scenario of recycling that would be more economically advantageous and ecologically relevant."

Allen Hershkowitz further noted that of the 25-26 percent of plastic water and soda bottles currently recycled, 70 percent come from the 10 states with bottle bills.

(*Recall the classic Seinfeld episode where Kramer and Newman schemed to return 5 cent NY bottles for the 10 cent MI deposit.)
(**Something of a euphemism for the homeless and vagrants. There exist (probably apocryphal) legends in Ann Arbor of entrepreneurial homeless men able to afford upmarket bicycles through collection and return of ubiquitous college town beer bottles/cans.)

The crux of our inefficient, linear approach to production and recycling:
"[We] subsidize pollution. We subsidize the virgin extraction industries and we subsidize the energy industry. And that makes recycling less cost competitive. One of the major benefits of recycling is energy savings...[If] we're subsidizing electricity by subsidizing oil and coal we're making the economic benefit of recycling diminished...The same goes for virgin paper making. We give away wood below market rates on national forest land...and this makes recycling paper less cost competitive...[The] marketplace is thoroughly distorted against environmental progress."
--Allen Hershkowitz, February 21, 2012 broadcast of the Diane Rehm Show*

(*I'd like to highly recommend listening to the broadcast in its entirety; other topics discussed include recycling e-waste, disincentives for excessive product packaging and organizing to demand better recycling programs from food providers. As mentioned earlier: fascinating.)

The Hershkowitzian view conforms neatly with the ethic espoused by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins in the environmental economics work Natural Capitalism. By neglecting to assign economic value to "natural capital' (exploited natural resources), traditional capitalist accounting does not fully adhere to its own principles - extracted resources injected into commerce are considered "income" and not liquidated capital. Consistent with Hershkowitz's points on recycling and underutilization of already harvested/produced products, Hawken, Lovins and Lovins posited that radical increases in resource productivity through a cyclical conception of product life could lead to tremendous economic gain if employed.

A Statement of Purpose

"STOP WRITING ABOUT BASKETBALL. No one gave a flying poop about the lockout, and people give even less of a flying poop now that it's back. If you want to write an entire book about something no one cares about, try environmentalism or something."*

--Sam, Edison (Taken from Bill Simmons's January 6, 2012 Mailbag on Grantland)

(*Stipulated: I generally enjoy reading Bill Simmons and many of the other talented writers employed at Grantland; the above quote actually came from a reader.)

This forum is birthed by a fear that Environmental Law and Policy issues will not be a part of the 2012 Election conversation. Or, more to the point, the "environmental problem" will not be discussed in the proper framework: it will be subsumed under the heading of "Energy," where the focus will be on jobs and growing the economy. The state of the natural environment itself will be relegated to a niche concern; "something that nobody cares about," as Sam from Edison calls it.

Obviously, Sam overstates the case - at least one person cares about "Environmentalism", otherwise these words, sentences, paragraphs and ideas would not be here. On the other hand, Sam also makes a trenchant observation - even if only by inartful implication: wide swaths of the public view Environmentalists as humourless scolds. Most Americans - weaned on the tradition of "rugged individualism" - do not appreciate being told what to do. Coming across with a self-righteous-sounding message about changing ecological consciousness can alienate people and influence them to tune that message out, particularly when the implication is that they must "fundamentally change" the way they have always lived. That such change is greatly needed and that a fairly major shift in consciousness is required are difficult points to get across in a consumer-oriented politco-economic culture.

This space operates under the assumption that continuing the current level of U.S. natural resource consumption is ecologically untenable - compounded by the (presumed) desire of developing nations to attain similar status. Thinking optimistically, my hope is that through discussing patterns of resource use and questioning the dogma of perpetually increasing economic growth, true persuasion may occur. The point is not to chide and induce feelings of guilt, but to use facts (such as they exist in the present climate) and reasoning to find workable solutions. With any luck, we can find our hover board or tricked-out DeLorean before its too late.

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Themes & Ideals: An Environmental Ethos

In thinking about the intersection of the Environment and the 2012 election, the following ecosophical prinicples and goals will guide discussion in this space:

• No exhausting debates on climate change science. I am not a climatologist by avocation and therefore do not feel confident to act as an arbiter of competing scientific theories. This forum accepts the consensus view of the International Panel on Climate Change to reflect the current state of scientific reality. On the other hand, consideration of competing policy arguments on how the U.S. should cope with climate change* is clearly within the purview of this forum.
• I do not intend to use loaded, prejudicial terminology such as "Big Oil", "Big Coal", or "Big (fill in the blank)". It is understood that these euphemisms are intended to draw attention to the powerful corporate industrial influences driving natural resource use. I would rather we carefully consider the factual consequences of current resoruce extraction policy than artificially tilt the debate one way or another through language alone.
• Eroding the idea that Environmentalism is a clever liberal ruse to increase governmental control of the economy. The command economies of Soviet Russia and the Eastern Bloc resulted in terrible environmental degradation in those countries; total government control of the economy would therefore seem incompatible with the goals of Environmentalism. In a legal sense, government has the duty to act as trustee of natural resources on behalf of the people. This duty as trustee should be seen to include the responsibility to promote natural resource use that ensures the long term health of the natural environment, for the benefit of the greater public good. In some instances, legislation provides an outlet for public participation to ensure that the government upholds its duty as trustee. The distinction between government's role as natural resource trustee and communistic environmental policy will likely be explored in greater thematic detail in later entries.
• This forum will demonstrate that Environmentalism is more than a "luxury" for bourgeois indulgence; it is an essential component of any program seeking to increase overall standards of living. Tautologically speaking, "environment" subsumes all other issues under its umbrella, in that the natural environment constitutes the setting where all life takes place. In contrast to Sam from Edison's credo, we all care about environmentalism, even if we don't know it.

(* Also including the argument that the U.S. should do nothing about climate change, for policy reasons.)