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”.