The Failed Promise of Recycling?

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The New York Times published an interesting piece on recycling on October 3rd by John Tierney that calls into question the effectiveness of recycling in our modern society. The essay is important in that it points out the diminishing returns of recycling and highlights that recycling is somewhat performative--something that particular communities do more than others--regardless of the benefits of the practice. Tierney questions the overall effectiveness of recycling at reducing carbon and the net gains in terms of actual energy saved. Communities,Tierney argues, have embraced all forms of recycling without necessarily thinking through all the costs and benefits. Is it really worthwhile to recycle some materials from a scientific standpoint?

But Tierney misses a key point in his piece--recycling is a symptom of overconsumption. It is like trying to lose weight by exercising once a week without changing food choices.

Every once in a while students tell me that our university doesn't have enough recycling bins. They want more places to put their empty water or soda bottle. We do have lots of bins for these items located all over campus, but I always point out that they didn't need to buy the bottle in the first place. Most of what we recycle we don't need to buy. Most of the waste we produce is by choice, not by necessity. We are building expensive recycling systems in our communities to deal with the societal illness of overconsumption. Recycling systems use tremendous amounts of energy and money that could be spent in other beneficial governmental activities. It is only by reducing waste via consuming less that we can truly solve many of the waste issues that we have in our culture.

In some ways, recycling is problematic in that it makes us feel okay about our bad choices. For example, recycling can make us feel good about using throw away utensils or plates if they are recyclable. However, it pushes off our wasteful choices to someone else to deal with in expensive and energy-intensive ways.

Don't get me wrong. We need to reuse and recycle as much as we can. However, we need to focus much more on waste reduction in our society. We consume way too much and the growth of recycling in the United States is a symptom of our overconsumption.