Culling Trash: The Dark Side

Memories:

• Collecting empty pop bottles door to door in grade school, to return to the store for cash.
• Leaving empty bean cans by an Ethiopian roadside after lunch, knowing local farmers would use them after we rode out of sight.
• Inhaling incinerator smoke in an Ohio town where residents paid for trash collection by the barrel, motivating them to burn what they could.
• Driving piles of newspapers to the municipal recycling center.
• Moving into a house with an old 1970s trash compactor, cleaner than incinerators but long made obsolete by recycling.
• Buying new kitchen appliances because parts to repair the old ones were no longer manufactured.

So much has changed. Some journalists suggest a dark side to certain changes.

Packaging. Bradford Plumer wrote in Mother Jones (“The Origins of Anti-Litter Campaigns,” May 22, 2006) that industry groups started the anti-litter campaign after World War II to keep consumers buying new goods in disposable packaging instead of refillable containers. This, and resultant state laws, shifted responsibility for needless trash from manufacturers to private citizens.

​Plastics. Laura Sullivan reported on NPR’s Morning Edition (“How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled,” Sept. 11, 2020) that oil and gas companies knew all along that recycling plastic would cost more than burying it. Plastic degrades after just a few rounds of recycling. With or without the familiar triangle of arrows, nearly all plastic goes into landfills or the ocean. Industry groups still promote recycling because it keeps us buying plastic.

Image: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.