Do you know where your recycling goes?

For me anyways, recycling in the nineties consisted mostly of laughing at the well-heeled San Franciscan’s on my block that seemed to be forever chasing bits of paper as they blew from their small blue recycling bins. For some ill-conceived reason, the bins did not have any lids on them, which meant that every once in awhile I would walk outside and there would be more recycling on the sidewalk than in the recycling bins.

No one ever seemed to know which day the recycling truck came either. It wasn’t uncommon back then for me to walk out of my apartment to see my well meaning neighbors dedicated to the concept of recycling faithfully lugging out their bins on a Tuesday morning and then having to lug them back and forth from their porches every night for the next two evenings because the recycling truck changed the collection day again.

In those days, the extent of my recycling was limited to taking barely thumbed expensive magazines out of other people’s recycling bins that were spilling out on the sidewalk, and reading them on the way to work. I would like to think I was also recycling by leaving the magazines on the bus seats when I exited.

When I finally moved to the suburbs, my apathy towards recycling became even worse, and it was not until the recycling bins were actually as large as the garbage bins that I finally started recycling my garbage. I will never forget the incredulous look on my landlady’s face when I sheepishly asked her if I was supposed to wash out my empty plastic containers before throwing them into the recycling. Ashamedly, I forgot whether she told me to wash out the containers or not, so to this day sometimes, I do, and sometimes I do not.

I am afraid my already ambiguous attitude though towards recycling paper became even more hopelessly conflicted after I met a woman who worked for California’s Office of Integrated Waste while having drinks at my local bar. Over a few shots of Italian Grappa, she related the disturbing details of how the majority of curbside collected newspaper in the United States is shipped to various ports of Asia, and has in fact become California’s largest export commodity.

Other painful tidbits about paper that jolted me out of buying super cushy quilted toilet paper and getting the recycled stuff, is the sad truth that consumption of recycled paper has declined dramatically. My friend Josh Richman who works at the Environmental Paper Network in Washington D.C. said “over 5 million acres of trees (roughly a state the size of New Jersey) are cut down every year in the southern part of the United States because Americans have lost interest in buying recycling paper”,“They have been lulled into thinking that because they are putting more paper in their curbside containers that they are helping.”

Do not get me wrong; recycling old paper is better than doing nothing at all. At least Asian countries recycle our old paper and use it. However, curbside recycling programs do not stop the widespread disappearance of American forests.

Susan Kinsella from the environmental group “Conservatree” in San Francisco said “Until there is a global mandate requiring paper mills to use at least some recycled content, American forests will continue to disappear.” With a worried look on her face she finished by saying, “Without a mandate, America will keep shipping its old paper overseas”.

Will “cap and trade” force Americans to turn off their air conditioners?

Even though I am 45 years old now, I have never quite gotten over the childhood habit of occasionally allowing myself to lapse into daydreams of “how I am going to become rich and famous”. In my minds eye I can picture myself becoming one of those slick ponytailed “green company” execs wearing high-end ethnic jewelry, and enviable earth toned hemp pants while cozying up to corporate gifting administrators for a living.

Perfect bliss and career contentment for me I imagined would be sipping on frangipani tea, while breathing the rarified air of an honest to god green guru. Maybe I could get a job trading energy derivatives at the Chicago Climate Exchange where all the cap and trade credits trade. Alternatively, perhaps I could help companies offset their pollution with carbon offsets by planting tree’s abroad. Besides, I always wanted to help poor people in far off places with exotic sounding names.

When I mentioned my aspirations to my friend Harriet who works as an auditor for the IRS, and happens to loathe derivatives she snapped, “A lot of these people selling carbon offsets are nothing more than greedy profiteers who spend all their spare time trading carbon derivatives on shamelessly unregulated climate change exchanges.”

“And furthermore” Harriet continued “Are you one of those insufferable people that seriously believes that if the government comes along and “caps” i.e. “limits” the amount of electricity that you can use, and charges you double for every kilowatt you go over your limit, that you will use less electricity?”

Harriet had a point. In my community, we have a rationing plan, only with water rationing instead of electricity. Under the water-rationing plan last year, homeowners and businesses had to stay under a limit the water district set or pay a higher rate for any water they used over their limit. When I looked at the statistics in my area that have been compiled on water rationing, the facts showed that over half of all homeowners decided to pay more for their water rather than cut back on their water consumption.

For years, I have heard people saying that a cap and trade plan will reduce the amount of pollution we create. Thanks to Harriet I am finally beginning to understand what a “cap and trade program actually is”. It does not take an ouija board to predict that the average person probably is not going to reduce their consumption of electricity by doing things such as turning off their air conditioners just to stay under any sort of “capped electricity limit”.

Not too long after that, one of my friends asked me “is Chicago Exchange really unregulated”. I wasn’t sure, so I phoned my longstanding acquaintance Dennis Holden who runs the External Affairs Department at the Commodities Future Trading Commission. To my dismay, Mr. Holden apologetically told me “Neither the SEC, or the Commodities Future Trading Commission have any oversight capabilities for the majority of derivatives trading at the Chicago Climate Exchange.” He added, “It’s something we’re working on. Worryingly, he said that same thing to me about oil derivatives after oil swap derivatives drove the price of oil up last summer.

Eventually, I came to decide that selling carbon credits or having a pollution-offset business was not really such a noble thing to consider after all. In my view, the real green business hero’s of today are the farmers growing food without the pesticides that cause ozone destruction, “the companies making fuel efficient cars or products that don’t destroy the planet, and the ordinary people who support these businesses.