Recycling: Green and Lazy

We’re all pretty lazy.  I mean, we are as a species, and certainly we are as an American culture.  Why work when you can play?  Why worry when you can have a good time?  Most of us are like this, to one degree or another.  I’m certainly no different.  I’d much rather play video games than wash the dishes.  Wouldn’t you?  I’d even go so far as to argue that this isn’t laziness.  It’s more of a matter of adjusting your priorities.  If my priority is to relax rather than to have a tidy kitchen, then putting off the dishes until another day makes sense.  And, hey, they’re MY dishes.  It’s MY problem, I can deal with it how I want.  Right?

This sort of attitude works fine when you’re the only one who has to deal with the consequences.  It’s another matter when your actions affect others.  This behaviour has been, in my view, a thorn in the side of the environmental movement almost since the notion of environmentalism first came into the social awareness.  There have been, and still are, many hurdles in the movement, but one of the toughest ones to tackle has been motivating people to actually do something.  We can educate people all we want (getting them to listen is another story).  We can provide alternatives, and solutions, but getting most people to use those solutions is tricky.  Because we’re lazy.  I don’t even mean that in a critical way.  To a certain extent, it’s more about being efficient, conserving personal time and energy.  Environmentalists have learned that, if we want to get people involved in environmental choices, education isn’t always enough.  Teach people that their choices are something that’s difficult and expensive and green, or something that’s cheap and easy and environmentally damaging, and most will go for the easy choice.  They may feel bad about it, but that won‘t change their decision.  So no wonder that, for so long, environmentalists latched on to something that was easy to do as their main focus.  Something that made so much sense that some industries were doing it anyway as a sound business practice.  And, unfortunately, something which, in many ways, has minimal impact.

Recycling, as a major thrust of the environmental movement, may have turned out to be as much an impediment to environmentalism as a success story.  Perhaps it was inevitable.  Few other green ideas are as easy to understand and as easy to adopt.  Just set aside some of your garbage every day, put it in a different container, and every so often drop it off somewhere (or if you’re lucky, just set it out by the road alongside your normal garbage).  Piece of cake, you don’t even have to think about it.  You almost don’t need to deviate from your normal habits.  I don’t know if any other practice could have replaced recycling as the first real champion of environmentalism.  And, for the most part, it’s entirely legitimate.  Recycling almost anything helps, in theory at least, to conserve resources which are often non-renewable.  Creating recycled materials often takes less energy and resources than creating new materials.  It keeps garbage out of landfills, and, ideally, it raises awareness of environmentalism as a whole.  That’s always been the hope, anyway, that recycling could serve as a sort of gateway into a greener lifestyle for ordinary Americans.

I suppose, in a way, that it’s been partially successful, in as much as most people are now at least aware of the environmental movement, often through recycling efforts and education.  However, what has made recycling widely accepted in society has also come back and bit the movement in the behind.  It’s easy.  So very easy.  Too easy.  How many times have you seen someone toss an empty soda can into a recycling bin and make a comment about “saving the planet”?  That’s the pitfall of recycling, of making it such a crucial component of environmental awareness.  Society finally comes to accept it, and since that’s what they hear the most about, people think that the mission is accomplished.  They’ve saved the planet.  Wasn’t that easy?  Can’t understand what all the fuss was about.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.  Recycling isn’t really the biggest issue facing the environmental community.  Not even close.  It’s just the simplest to address.  Even if everyone in the world recycled everything that they could, it would only be a step in the right direction, not the solution to our challenges.  The fact that we’re not even close to that, of course, only underscores how far we really have to go.  And still, I sense a notion in our culture that we’ve done enough on that front.  Mission Accomplished.  All we need is a big banner proudly displayed behind a dumpster filled with glass jars and tin cans, and the metaphor will be complete.

It’s a paradox, a catch-22, and no question about it.  The issue that helped to seat environmentalism at the adults table in the American dining room has also been holding it back in the background, a victim of its own success.  For so many people, when they think of environmentalism, they think of recycling, and not much else.  They know about it, they do it, or at least they could if they wanted to, and that’s the end of it as far as they’re concerned.  We’ve tied ourselves to this single issue too strongly, in our efforts to get people to do something, anything, to make a change.  It’s oversimplified a movement that’s anything but simple.  Calling yourself an environmentalist just because you recycle is sort of like calling yourself a pilot because you know where the cockpit is on an airplane.  It’s a good first step, but it’s a lousy place to stop learning if you really want to fly the plane.

Other issues have come into the forefront, to be sure, but they’re suffering the same problems.  The challenging problems get ignored, while the problems with simple solutions, or at least solutions that are perceived as simple, get all the attention, not to mention funding.  Sure, global warming (I hate that term, but that’s for another day) is in the news a lot, but what has the public already decided upon as the solution to that rather enormous issue?  Hybrid electric automobiles.  It’s recycling all over again.  It’s easy to do.  You were going to buy a car anyway, and you’re still using the same familiar gasoline, so “save the planet” and get a hybrid.  I’m not badmouthing hybrids any more than I am recycling, but it’s the same problem… people see an easy solution and look no further.  The Toyota Prius isn’t going to stop global climate change any more than recycling newspapers has stopped deforestation.  It’s better than buying a Hummer, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean we should be satisfied with it.

Unfortunately, I have no sage advice to offer on this one.  I’m as stumped as anyone.  If we can’t make people care enough to act, then we need to make acting so convenient that it’s hard not to do it.  But this can’t always be accomplished.  Even with recycling, we couldn’t nudge people into the next step.  We’ve tried shifting from “Recycle” to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”, but it never caught on.  I doubt many people even really understand what that’s intended to mean.  They just see the word “recycle” in there, and since they’re doing that, they figure that’s good enough.  Anything else would require effort.  And, of course, that’s an issue, because we’re lazy.

The point to all this ranting, if indeed there is one, is that while recycling is all fine and good, it is not the be-all and end-all of the environmental movement.  Its acceptance into society, while in many ways extremely difficult to accomplish, is not a major achievement.  Recycling doesn’t really make you green.  It means that you’re not as wasteful as you could be, that you have some common sense.  That’s about it.  Recycling commonly used materials is so simple, so basic, so obviously efficient that it’s really amazing that it was ever an issue that environmentalists even needed to address.  It should have been something we’ve always done without thinking about it.  If a company recycles its waste or uses recycled materials in its products, that shouldn’t be a selling point.  That should be a given.  It should go without saying.  Making recycling a common sight isn’t a victory.  It’s not even a starting point.  It’s something we’ve had to do just to get up to the starting point.  The real challenge is making people give a damn.  Getting people to look at the long term, at the bigger picture.  Convincing them to engage in solutions that may require a bit more than tossing a can into the bin on the left rather than the one on the right.  If we can’t get people to actually change their behaviour, their way of thinking, then all the recycling in the world won’t mean anything.

I’d probably come up with a way to do all that myself, but, of course, I’m far too lazy.