Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States

Conclusion

Conclusion The information I have presented in this book leads me to propose some specific changes in U.S. solid-waste policy and, far more important, to encourage an opening up of discourse and practice within those aspects of the environmental movement that focus on garbage, recycling, and the excesses of consumption. First, I argue for a strong federal role in data gathering and dissemination, legislation of mandatory extended producer responsibility for what I call “modern materials” (e-waste, household hazardous waste, and most if not all plastic wastes), and leadership in what Maureen Smith (1997) defines as environmentally grounded sectoral analysis, coordinated as part of a national materials policy. As opposed to focusing on the moment of waste or the greening of the economy, the goal of this policy approach should be the detoxification and diminishment of materials flowing into, through, and out of the United States. Second, I controversially suggest that paper and metal be the only materials collected in commingled curbside form for recycling in cities, to be processed through human-scaled, safe, well-compensated circuits of materials recovery facility processing and remanufacture that are kept regional and national in scope when and where possible. I advocate the separate collection of glass using municipal or possibly local nonprofit labor so as to route it to refill or bottle-to-bottle recycling and to use it as aggregate only as a last resort. In this regard, deposit systems, standardization of bottle sizes and colors across content categories (soda, beer, food uses), and fees assessed on the glass, beverage, and bottling industry so as to encourage glass-container use over plastic should be pursued synergistically on a national or at least regional (multistate) scale. Third, complementing the recycling of paper, metal, glass, and plastic fractions of municipal solid waste as well as existing separate circuits of 218 Conclusion construction and demolition debris recycling, I urge cities to pursue composting aggressively, concurrently developing small- and large-scale operations for the transformation of organic materials into soil amendment (which I discuss more fully later). Fourth, in regard to just waste solutions, I encourage the cultivation of community-based enterprises that yield good jobs associated with reuse and remanufacture, developed at scales large enough and relevant enough to, using the words of Kenneth Geiser, “progressively reduce [the] throughput of materials and energy” through the U.S. economy (2001, 367). This means thinking about regional systems to move masses of materials if and when that is the goal, with a clear distinction made about the role of small enterprises that work in concert with such systems. I suggest specifically that we rethink the notion that small enterprises , if numerous and diverse enough, can absorb the flow of urban discards such that the burdens of disposal cease. The goal instead should be organization of medium- to large-size infrastructure that is truly public in that it serves and is informed by citizens. To this end, it will be essential to harness the historical and present potential of the scrap industry so as to counter the current model in which the disposal industry operates most recycling infrastructure privately under contract to local governments. Finally and most important, I urge those concerned about waste and its relation to social and environmental problems to relegate notions of personal commitment and responsibility, as well as expectations of social change premised in step-by-step incrementalism, to the back burner. These constructs gird the American approach to saving the earth far too much. Although they are not worthless outright, there is nothing to be lost from turning away from them to cultivate different sets of ideas and strategies that maturely confront the fact that the materials economy is a complex, global system in which businesses employ people and transform things in highly destructive ways outside the gaze or reach of the savviest consumer. Waste and Citizenship My proposals are meant to invite discourse and debate about ecological citizenship. By “ecological citizenship,” I mean the range of options, strategies, actions, and communications that people concerned about problems of resource depletion, pollution, ecosystemic disruption, health risks, and inequity globally and locally should feel free to engage in. Conclusion 219 Ecological citizens should have the right to know and understand issues of ecological concern through accessible data and reporting, but they should understand that digesting such data may take some study and reflection...