Average piece of recycled paper has travelled back and forth from China twice
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 after bits of paper as it blew from their small blue recycling bins.
For some ill conceived reason, it seemed to me like over half of the recycling crates didn’t have lids on them, which meant that every once in awhile I’d walk outside and there would be more recycling on the sidewalk than in the recycling crates.
It wasn’t uncommon either to see people lugging out their recycling in the morning and then lugging it back again in the evening because the recycling truck failed to arrive, and they didn’t want their recycling blowing all over the place overnight.
From my second story window in Russian Hill I always knew what time it was by the sounds coming from the street. Right around 2am, there was always the clink, clink, clinking sound of bottles going into the rubbish as the bartenders emptied out their empty bottles for the evening. An hour or so later, after the clinking sound, came the steady din of slow moving garbage trucks that would roll down the street collecting garbage. Sometimes the sound of clinking bottles smashing into the compactor was so loud that it would wake me up, and I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep again.
Just before dawn broke, along would come the garbage rustlers carrying heavy sacks of recycling on their backs, which would noisily plow through my Dempsey sized dumpster, which was beneath my second story window. Like clockwork, they always seemed to arrive just before my alarm clock rang. So when I heard them rummaging through the garbage, I knew it was almost time to wake up.
In those days, the extent of my recycling was limited to taking barely thumbed expensive magazines out of other people’s recycling bins that stuck out of the crates on the sidewalk, which I would read on my way to work.
There was also something which occurred one day of the year, called “Furniture Recycling Day”, where the city would offer to pick up people’s unwanted furniture at no cost. Often times people would take the unwanted furniture put out on the sidewalk and lug it home. The best year I had was when the dot com companies crashed and all the overpaid twenty some things on my block lost their overpaid jobs, and couldn’t afford their apartment. They moved in such a hurry, leaving tons of designer furniture and high end knick knacks all up and down my street. In just a few weeks, I had an entire apartments worth of nice furniture for free.
When I finally moved to the suburbs, I’m afraid my apathy towards recycling became even worse, and it wasn’t until the recycling bins were actually as large as the garbage bins that I began recycling.
I will never forget the incredulous look on my landlady’s face as I sheepishly inquired as to whether my empty organic Trader Joe’s pre packed organic salad containers were supposed to go into the recycling or not. She pointed at the container and said “If it says recycling on it, then you put it into the recycling”. My next question of course was going to be whether or not I had to wash out the empty containers before putting them into the bin. I felt so foolish of course not knowing, that I decided not to ask, and of course I still don’t know the answer to that question.
I find it rather ironic that while most of the people are so into recycling. Nowadays, yet most of them have no idea what happens to their recycling after it gets hauled away from the curbside. Here in California where I live, almost all of the paper that people put into their recycling bins, gets bundled up and put on a ship to China, and the Chinese make recycled pulp out of it.
Once the recycled paper arrives in China, it gets driven by truck to a deinking plant where all the ink is removed from the paper. After the paper is de-inked; it is re-bleached and turned back into pulp, loaded up on a ship, and then sold back to the US paper mills as “recycled pulp”.
Because of higher environmental air and water quality standards than exists in China, the deinking pulps that used to operate in the United States in the nineties closed, and to this date, there is only one deinking plant left in the U.S.
That means the average piece of paper containing recycled content has travelled back and forth across the ocean from China at least two times.