Nowadays, recycling bins are as common as trash bins, and the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle!” has been ingrained into everyone’s heads. So it’s shocking to learn that Seattle University may soon have to stop recycling altogether. Seattle University has received an audit outlining how as much as 10% of the contents sent to the recycling plant are unrecyclable due to food waste, plastic, clothes, and styrofoam. If the school does not clean up our recycling by February 21st, then it will have no choice but to send all of our recycling straight to the landfill. Not only is this costly to the university, but it also means landfills will reach capacity quicker, and landfill space for the United States is already running scarce.
Part of the reason Seattle University is facing this situation is because of global politics. In the past, the United States and other countries sent their plastic waste to China in order to save money on recycling and free up land usage. A year ago, China stopped accepting other countries’ plastic waste, which has led a global panic on where waste will end up. Typically, this plastic ends up in developing countries who either incinerate it, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, or have no other choice than to let it accumulate, which leads to toxins in the ground and health hazards to the people. Of course, the elitism and environmental racism present in this practice are alarming enough, but in order for the United States’ recycling infrastructure to stay afloat, the problem of recycling contamination needs to be addressed.
In order for something to be recycled, the recycling plant must have the right technology to correctly recycle the material. Furthermore, this material must be clean and dry to be considered uncontaminated. Even one piece of recycling that is contaminated can affect the whole lot, as when the compactor squeezes everything together, the contaminant spreads throughout the load until the entire truckload has to been sent to the landfill.
This calls into the question the overall effectiveness of recycling. Yes, for our whole lives we’ve been taught that we have to recycle if we care about the environment, but it may be time to rethink if that’s really the most helpful thing for our planet. For one, recycling does contribute to emissions. Thinking back to sending our plastic over to China, the amount of fuel that it takes to transport recyclables is equivalent to 50 million cars. On top of that, there is the energy used to incinerate or reprocess the recycled material. And this doesn’t come cheap, either. Recycling, as opposed to landfills, can be incredibly expensive for individuals and for cities, and with the lack of room to send recycled plastic, some plants have no choice but to send their overstock of plastic straight to the landfill.
Of course, recycling is a noble effort, and it does help circumvent other important environmental factors, such as deforestation and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that is slowly leaking microplastic into our food chain. It is important that when recycling, you know what can and cannot be recycled at your local recycling plants. For Seattlites, this handy flyer shows you how to sort your trash as well as what to do with those hard to recycle items. The most important thing to remember with recycling is that when in doubt, do not recycle. Remember what I said about entire truckloads being sent to the landfill because only a few items were contaminated? Don’t be that person. Make sure that what you’re throwing in the recycling bin is clean, and if it’s going in that blue bin, you’re 100% certain it belongs there.
However, part of this recycling crisis is due to the public’s rose-colored image of what recycling actually is. Although it may be the first thing people think of when it comes to individual actions to help the environment, it is certainly not the most impactful. At the end of the day, we need to not only look at how to deal with our trash but also how to produce less trash. Remember the two words that come before recycle in that alliterative slogan? Reduce and reuse. These two options are significantly better for the environment than the economically and environmentally costly process of recycling.