Selected Readings
The American Recycling Myth
Jon Hazlett
This July, China notified the World Trade Organization that it planned to begin banning the importation of certain types of “foreign garbage” perceived as a threat to the Chinese environment. The proposed ban includes numerous types of waste plastic and unsorted paper that are commonly collected as recyclable items in the United States.
This announcement sent shock waves through the recycling industry. Large, multi-national garbage hauling corporations like Waste Management Inc. have already begun to redirect shipments of lower-grade waste plastic to alternative destinations. Meanwhile, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, the primary trade association for the array of companies involved with recycling, called the ban “catastrophic” for the industry. Given recycling’s ubiquitous status as a “green” practice in municipalities throughout the United States, it is striking that neither organization expressed concern about the status of local collection programs or the potential environmental effects the ban may bring to the United States.
Despite the panic among recycling companies, most American households diligently filling their recycling bins have not heard about the Chinese ban. How is it that a potentially “catastrophic” event does not ring alarm bells for consumers concerned with environmental protection? And why is an industry, built on the “ecological” practice of recycling, seemingly unconcerned about the environmental consequences of this ban? The answer lies in the ways Americans have been trained to think about recycling.
The Recycling Myth
Popular ideas about the purpose and origin of recycling programs help obscure the actual processes at work in the recycling industry. They suggest that recycling programs resulted solely from consumer demand for conservation and a cleaner environment. This misconception began at the height of the environmental movement in the late-1960s when environmentalists championed the ideal of individual and local action. Within a year of the first Earth Day in 1970, over 3,000 small-scale community collection centers were launched. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a leading proponent of recycling programs, lauded the boom in recycling centers as an example of the power of motivated consumers to develop waste management systems that conserved both natural resources and energy. With this message of individual power, environmentalists helped associate recycling in many Americans’ minds with such small-scale, local collection programs.
Even detractors of the recycling movement located its power in the motivations of consumer demand, albeit in a more cynical manner. At the height of the recycling boom of the 1990s, journalist John Tierney eviscerated municipal programs as nothing more than wastes of time and money that environmental groups used to legitimize their existence. According to Tierney, recycling as we know it was born in 1987 as “Amer