Waste Land

During my garbage experiment, which I recounted in my last column, I read the book “Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage.” Written by Heather Rogers, this highly recommended work documents what happens to the stuff we discard. I found particularly unnerving Rogers’ account of the development of National Recycling Day, which this year took place on November 15.

National Recycling Day was the brainchild of Keep America Beautiful (KAB), a not-for-profit organization that began in 1953 with funding from a number of powerful industries determined to maintain their profits by increasing their unregulated manufacture of disposable packaging. American Can Company, the people who brought us the one-way can, so ubiquitous now as to be invisible, and Owens-Illinois Glass Company, which came up with the concept of the disposable bottle, along with 20 other companies like Coca-Cola, Dixie Cup, Richfield Oil and the National Association of Manufacturers, conjured up the idea of KAB to shift the blame for the ever-mounting piles of trash from themselves to consumers. The organization set out to convince us that they weren’t responsible for making stuff designed to be tossed out after one use—we were responsible for disposing of it improperly.

KAB lobbied against production restrictions and measures that would require the use of less profitable refillable containers. According to Rogers, KAB, using a well-financed media campaign, succeeded in turning “any stirrings of environmental awareness away from industry’s massive and supertoxic destruction of the environment, telescoping ecological disaster down to the eyesore of littering and singling out the real villain: the notorious ‘litterbug.’” Some of my contemporaries might remember the slogan: “Every Litter Bit Helps.”

In the 1970s, KAB lobbied aggressively against and succeeded in defeating many states’ proposed bottle bills. When public support for bottle bills increased, a KAB-funded company opened one of the nation’s first recycling facilities. In 1976, American Can Company opened its recycling center. To further shift the onus away from unbridled manufacture of disposables, the Container Corporation of America created the logo for recycling, the now-familiar triangle of arrows, and the Society of Plastics Industries devised the numbering system for plastics. Between 1960 and 1980 recycling efforts increased—and the amount of solid waste in America quadrupled.

Fast forward to the new millennium. To date, only 11 states have bottle bills, and unregulated manufacture of disposable bottles continues at staggering proportions. Only 40 percent of the 79.6 tons of packaging produced each year is recycled. 32 million tons ends up in landfills. The plastic bottle and container industry reported a $9.924.2 million profit in 2009, a profit made possible as the industry externalizes costs. American consumers pay nine cents of every dollar for packaging, and taxpayers bear the cost of waste removal.

And we busily sort and tote, much of what we drive to the recycling center never gets recycled. Two-thirds of plastic and glass bottles end up in landfills. Twenty to 30% of America’s plastic recyclables are exported to countries with less stringent environmental laws where they are sometimes burned or buried. Ditto the ubiquitous plastic grocery bag.

Whatever you buy ends up as garbage—electronics, clothing, toys, appliances, household goods. Products are built to break down so we have to buy new ones, to the benefit of manufacturers and the detriment of the environment.

Something to think about the next time you’re shopping.