Requiem for the Environmental Movement: Investigating the Sad Saga of Recycling

I was present at the glorious birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. That was the year of the first-ever ‘Earth Day.’

Earth Day featured heady optimism and a sense that now, at last, humanity would act rationally and become responsible stewards of our beautiful planet Home. It seemed like the beginning of a new, much saner phase of human civilization. And for quite a while, that dream seemed to be coming true (there’s that nasty word ‘seemed’ again): recycling programs began to spread around the country and the world, and humans’ ecological awareness was increasing rapidly.

But then… sometime around the new millennium, humanity collectively ‘hit the wall,’ and forward progress on recycling slowly ground to a halt — and sometimes shifted into reverse.

What the hell happened?

The genesis of ‘throwaway living’

There’s a very instructive historical timeline of recycling available on the Busch Systems (a Canadian recycling firm) website, spanning from ancient Greece to the recent past (2019). It turns out, recycling has a long and fascinating history, but only became a major ‘thing’ in our society after Earth Day provided a fresh, potent impetus.

However, I was particularly struck by this section about the year 1955:

The August 1st [1955] issue of Life magazine offers a two-page article on “Throwaway Living.” Consumers are progressively sold on the idea that single-use items are a necessity of the modern lifestyle.

Ease and convenience become the two most desirable qualities in product marketing, inevitably leading to parks, forests, and highways becoming littered with garbage.

There we have it: the seeds of one of the core ecological issues underlying ‘modern’ civilization. On the one hand, we’ve got our growing addiction to throwaway ‘convenience,’ and on the other our growing awareness of ecology and environmental stewardship. Which would win the day?

The grim truth about recycling

Sadly, we all know the answer by now: ‘convenience’ won out, big time, and the earth and human civilization are the big losers. Earth Day truly seemed like the start of a major revolution in human consciousness and our outer activities — and for a while, that dream was being (somewhat) realized.

But in the end, corporate profits, consumerism, and ‘convenience’ proved too irresistible to pass up. The Busch website’s recycling timeline comes across as upbeat and fairly optimistic (not surprisingly, since it’s a recycling firm!), but when we look at the actual statistics about recycling over the past few decades, an entirely different picture emerges.

The website of The Recycling Partnership leads off with the headline “How do we capture the 79% of recyclables we lose to landfills?” 79%!! That rate of recycling is simply pathetic and indicates that both individual and corporate incentives to recycle have either waned or were never strong to begin with.

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There are three main social problems that contribute to this dismal result: rapid population growth, rapid growth of ‘consumerism,’ and long-term corporate foot-dragging regarding finding ways to make recycling profitable. Let’s face it, the corporate world is not going to recycle just to be ‘good’ or ‘responsible.’ For them, it has to be a profitable venture.

The big problem, of course, is that so far it’s not. Or in the rare case that it IS, the profits are minimal. Most people alive today probably remember the ‘ghost barges’ of garbage that roamed up and down the east coast of the U.S. in the 80s and 90s, searching for a ‘home’ for their cargoes of reeking garbage.

Why did these ‘ghost barges’ even exist? Because the profits to be made from recycling were so tiny or non-existent that thousands of tons of potentially recyclable ‘garbage’ were instead bound for dumps and landfills — but lo and behold, the dumps and landfills in many nations were already filled to capacity and overflowing.

Thus, the brilliant ‘solution’ these countries came up with was to (hopefully) dump their excess garbage on other countries like the U.S., or anyone else foolish enough to take it.

Some horrifying statistics

The overall statistics about our rates of recycling are horrendous. The Environment.co website puts it this way (about the U.S.):

It would be a dream come true if every item you diligently place into the recycling bin rather than throwing it in the trash can went through the recycling process. However, it seems as if recycling, especially in the United States, is broken…. One of the main reasons why not all recycling gets recycled is because of China’s ban on U.S. recycling products….

After the ban, the U.S. sent its recyclables to other countries. Still, anywhere up to 70 percent of those materials don’t end up being recycled anyways. Thus, it ends up being more expensive for the U.S. to recycle rather than send waste to the landfill. Funding is needed to recycle, but most government funds go to other sectors.

The recycling process is still quite broken in the U.S. In 2017, out of all of the waste generated, only about one-third was recycled.

The Green Matters website breaks down the percentages of ‘recycled’ materials that actually get recycled. It’s a grim picture:

· Plastics — 9%. That’s right, 9%! So fully 91% of our plastic garbage ends up on our streets and in landfills or the ocean.

· Steel — 69%. Not too bad, but still needs major improvement.

· Glass — 31%. Simply pathetic.

· Paper products — 68%. It should be much better by now.

And I’d add the category of ‘Electronics,’ meaning discarded computers, tablets, TVs, cell phones, smartphones, etc. The recycling rate for these is minimal, as well — and they leach toxic heavy metals into our landfills.

Overall, these statistics reveal the dismal failure of our recycling programs, processes, involved corporations, and our entire society. There is no easier, ‘nicer’ way to put it.

Intense ‘consumerism’ keeps spreading and growing

The unfortunate truth is that the combined influence of those three factors I listed above — rapid population growth, the rapid growth of ‘consumerism,’ and long-term corporate foot-dragging — has undermined or sometimes reversed the initial gains made via recycling programs. The amount of non-recycled garbage, waste, consumer items, electronics, etc. is staggering, unconscionable, and increasing — yet there are no workable solutions at hand.

The bottom line, it seems to me, is that more and more people around the globe want (and are convinced to want) more and more ‘stuff’ and ‘convenience’ — and our recycling processes and (weak) commitment to recycling are not keeping up with the massive tsunami of garbage we’re collectively creating. It’s simply not happening, and sadly, there’s little popular will to improve this situation.

Over the past 40 years, over two billion new, voracious ‘consumers’ have been created in fast-developing nations like China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and South Korea. These folks have long resented the vast prosperity of the U.S. and other Western nations, and now believe (understandably) that they ‘deserve’ the same level of ‘consumer comforts’ that we Westerners have enjoyed for many decades.

It’s all quite understandable — but nevertheless, it’s still a mounting global disaster. Neither the Earth nor our societies can handle this level of toxic, out-of-control consumption and manic ‘consumerism.’

Rest In Peace, environmentalism. Adios, amigo.

It would be one thing — and a very proud and wonderful achievement — if the nations of the world were truly ‘on top’ of our garbage and recycling issues. The miserable on-the-ground reality of our situation is another matter entirely, since we do NOT ever recycle the vast majority of garbage and throw-away ‘stuff.’

Tragically, the entire planet has become a toxic dumping ground for all our chemical, food, plastic, and electronic waste materials — and the already vast amount of waste and waste-caused pollution is steadily increasing. We have gotten stuck in a manmade and disastrous trap, and there’s no good way out. None.

Then, if we add to this picture our disastrous dependence on fossil fuels and our stubborn resistance to changing our ways and drastically cutting our CO2 and methane emissions… well, the self-made trap we’re stuck in becomes glaringly obvious.

Our inability — refusal, really — to rein in climate change, along with the facts that Trump and the far right are big-time climate change deniers AND we keep refusing to get serious about full-scale recycling, have all combined to put the entire environmental movement in deep jeopardy. Worse, it’s in full ‘melt-down’ mode.

That’s why I’m saying the environmental movement has failed. Sure, it had some successes, even some crucial ones — such as banning DDT and improving the quality of our air and drinking water — but overall, it failed to stop or even tame the juggernaut of capitalism and global ‘consumerism.’

That’s why this article is indeed a ‘requiem for the environmental movement.’

More personally, I have to say: Environmentalism, I loved you, supported you, and still love and support you… but I’m grievously disappointed in you and humanity’s response to you. In the end, you have not been effective and have not adequately protected or ‘saved’ this precious planet.

R.I.P., environmentalism. We already miss you.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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