Improve recycling by ending it

For four years as the Director of Sustainability for a technical university, I saw countless innovations in energy systems, water management, lighting - myriad ways to improve the use of resources or reduce the impact that human processes have on the environment and quality of life. In all that time, one would think the greatest challenge to someone in my position would have been selecting the right technologies to make the greatest impact, or getting disparate individuals with competing technologies to agree on a strategy to implement both and learn from the opportunity. One would be wrong. The toughest challenge I had to face?

Getting some of the most educated people in the country to know where to discard their sandwich wrapper.

We can get general agreement that the concept of landfilling waste material runs counter to almost everything we know about nature. All materials that result from one process in life serve as feed stock for another, and so on until finally linking back to form a cycle that starts over again. Even things that get buried find their way back into service. No symbol of our disposable culture can top our man-made process of burial and encapsulation of material without thought to its next use. The question is never if we should end landfilling, but more perplexingly if we can end landfilling.

For the better part of my life, the three Rs - reduce, reuse, recycle - have served as the potential answer to the end of landfill waste. Unfortunately, because the first two have carried a connotation of sacrifice more suited to the Depression Era/World War II generation comfortable with rationing and scrapping, our modern American society does not value them, so we have been left with a focus on the third. This has led to a proliferation of blue bins, green cans, and multi-sort stations...of numbered plastics, "biodegradable" packaging, and mobius triangles. Depending on your town/school/company and the waste hauler(s), you either can or cannot recycle that salad container, you either can or cannot have a dollop of cream cheese left on your bagel wrapper, you either can or cannot include the cardboard box in which they delivered the pizza. After spending four years looking at the resources, education, and data analysis that goes into successful recycling programs, I have come to one conclusion.

Recycling is too hard.

Consider what a recycling coordinator in a large institution or campus environment must do. As with everything that requires education, you have to engage a person multiple times, and on multiple levels. In addition, you need a clear message that does not change, and you need to connect the person with a benefit to them that overcomes the natural tendency to take the most efficient path. Lastly, you need to make sure that nothing disenfranchises the person you want to keep engaged. This requires a level of planning, training, and execution that rivals an Ocean's Eleven heist, plus continual feedback, reporting, and marketing to keep people excited and willing to keep up with the program.

All this to get half of what can be recycled into the recycling stream.

Everything that we miss, gets landfilled...permanently.

Some places have figured it out. San Francisco has a law requiring residents to recycle and use a three-can system: trash (landfill), recycling, organic waste. The residents pay a monthly fee for the service, and they can reduce their fee if they require a smaller can for trash and put most of their solid waste in the recycling cans. Even with this stalwart program, they still landfill about one-quarter of their solid waste.

That is not enough.

The only way to get rid of landfilling, is to stop recycling.

I do not mean we have to stop collecting what we no longer want or can use, and have that material broken down into usable form as feed stock to another process. We need to stop naming that process as something that differentiates it from landfilling. Come to think of it, we need to stop naming that which we cannot recycle as "trash". We need to change the culture so that everything we have "leftover" goes somewhere else. We need to stop accepting that some items can be "recycled" while some cannot.

We need everything that we produce to be recyclable...thereby eliminating the need to have recycling vs. landfill.

As with many simple, common sense solutions, the response varies between, "There is no way to make everything so that it can be deconstructed and reconstituted", and "We cannot afford to do it." We are wrong on both accounts. What we cannot afford to do, and what is completely impossible to do, is to amass large quantities of scarce resources and bury them in an unusable form deep below the earth, and continue to do that indefinitely.

Realistically, the transition does require a fair amount of planning, some targeted cost-shifting, and a willingness to abandon an industry and principle we have clung to as the one environmental agenda that appears to have gained traction. Industry, government, and consumer groups need to align behind the concept and create an aggressive, but achievable, timetable to transition from a culture and economy that accepts once-through processes for materials, to a culture and economy that accepts nothing being lost from our resource chain. To fully accomplish this will require, at a minimum:

1. A fee structure that charges manufacturers who produce a product that they cannot reconstitute into a usable form. The fee would phase in after a three-year transition period, and would increase each year thereafter. Those companies that choose to transition will have a competitive advantage against those that choose the status quo.

2. Use the proceeds from the fee collection to fund community collection centers/coops/businesses. Especially in residential areas, communities will need to maximize the value of what they collect, and need to build and advance that infrastructure. Seed and challenge grants to build that infrastructure will provide the needed bridge from the current economy to one that values all material. That value will provide a sustainable funding stream for the communities to grow their capacity as time marches on.

3. Eliminate the taxes that fund municipal waste collection. Once the first two structures come into place, the grants can build an infrastructure that allows for the replacement of solid waste collection as a taxpayer-subsidized business model with a one that looks to the reselling of valuable material as the funding stream. Completely accomplishing this step requires one last major change,

4. Transition the fleet of solid waste collection vehicles to one more nimble and appropriate, that coincidently causes less damage to the environment. Shifting the collection, processing, and recirculation of material to the community level requires less energy and pollution intensity. Basing our expectations on this model, and requiring any entity that looks to aggregate to improve upon reductions in pollution and energy intensity, will be necessary to fully create a marketplace that values both the material and the health of the end user.

Much dialogue needs to happen to make this vision reality. It will not be easy, but neither will be dealing with the consequences of pursuing a utopia whereby thinking that continually burying resources makes us more resilient and provides a better foundation for our society. The time has come to stop the incrementalism, and the market-based hopes that with more education, better infrastructure, and more personal responsibility, consumers will become perfect recyclers.

The point of the exercise is, we should not have to be. Just because someone can manufacture something that cannot be reconstituted, does not mean we have to have a book in our home telling me where to put it when I am done with it. If we as a society require those who make products - and have all the information about what is needed - to put in the time and effort to make it fully recyclable, then we can work hard at the collecting and transporting to make sure they get back into the marketplace as quickly as possible.

That is the structure that will work...one without recycling, and without landfills.