Can’t get enough.
A title to a cover album; a rock song? Rock and roll is going through my head. Walk of life. Destiny. What happens when you truly surrender. How casually our destiny arrives. Rock and roll is definitely a form of fight, and an act of rebellion. This is Bono speaking. Not me. I’m just paraphrasing from his autobiography, Surrender.
I was lucky to have found U2 early in my life. Their music, Bono’s attention to social justice and his drive to promote world peace, have inspired me throughout my journey. From early days when I was a young advisor to an important world leader, fighting for political and personal freedoms across the former Soviet republics, to liberating Europe from the Russian energy chokehold by designing a pipeline that would eventually bring Caspian gas to Souther Europe and Italy. I was always, come to think of it, drawn to the big impact problems. The challenges that fundamentally affect millions, billions. Trash, human waste, is now my obsession, the last big problem we are tackling at Binit.
Last week, I had the privilege, and I mean it, it was a privilege, to be given a tour of the Brooklyn recycling facility, where 2000 tonnes of New York City’s recycled materials, plastic, aluminum, paper and glass, passes through. And Kara Napolitano was the best tour guide. Her ability to boil a complex problem into bite size digestible easy to remember facts was inspiring. She left me with two data points which I’ve been thinking about since leaving the facility: 35% and not enough material.
Allow me to explain.
New Yorkers recycle little. That’s a fact. Out of 12,000 tonnes of waste they throw away daily, only 2000 of it makes it to the recycling facility. That’s a ration of 1 to 6. New York could be recycling 50% and more of their waste. So why are they not?
Laziness. Habit. Don’t give a shit to do it. We can call it whatever we want, but what it is not, is a problem of knowledge. Because everyone and their dog, in New York City, knows cans and plastic bottles, of which they consume inordinate amounts off, are recyclable. But what got my head spinning, in the not enough part, is that now companies like Coca Cola, are looking for recycled plastic and aluminum, turning Manhattans of this world inside out searching for more bottles and cans. Let’s say this again: Coca Cola is looking for packaging, paying people (indirectly) to rummage through your trash in hope of finding more ‘gold’. As nuts as this sounds, there’s a reason — ESG commitments, which they’ve adopted that ties them to selling its most popular soda drinks in bottles made from 100% recycled plastic.
That’s a very noble goal indeed. Only there’s the ‘not enough’ problem. We, the consumers, don’t do a good enough job recycling, and they can’t find enough plastic through the traditional recycling center to ensure they hit their targets. Desperate to keep on track in their ESG targets, they are paying a lot more for recycled plastic thus driving the price of this recycled material high enough for a gray collection economy to thrive. And it exists in most major US cities. You have people rummaging through trash picking out bottles and cans. They get 5–10 cents per container, depending on the place and season from a small collection warehouse. And those warehouses sell it further to bigger collectors who eventually move this stuff to material processing plants, where Coke then buys its recycled plastics from.
Can we do better? Should we do better? Of course we should. And it’s not about helping Coke be Coke, but it’s helping Coke(s) of this world be serious about cleaning up. And recycling, while not the golden solution to a waste free world, is still a far better way of dealing with preservation of material value than landfills and incinerators could (and will) ever be. And that’s what Kara had in mind when she said, we don’t do enough, the residents of New York. Finally there is a legitimate and steady demand for recycled plastic and we could fill it, but our bad habits, of not bothering to do the thing we know how to do, and our trash system is set up to handle, get in the way.
Accountably is the issue plaguing trash collection and waste sorting the world over. And this brings me to the 35%. That’s all the wrong stuff people in New York City put in their recycling bins. From light bulbs, to soiled baby diapers, to yogurt cups still full of the un-had creamy delicacy. What are we doing? Again, is this a knowledge problem, or just a total disregard, lack of accountability? We studied this problem in detail at Binit, as we designed our tracking solution for waste, and what we found is that people mostly know where things go when taking a quiz. So no, it’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a disregard that we feel towards our environment. Towards the materials that make up the empty containers we hold in our hands. Because we have been trained, programmed, to think that packaging has no value, only what’s inside has.
That’s the fallacy we need to let go. Packaging is immensely valuable. As evidenced by the people who go through our trash picking out bottles and cans. But a dipper full of shit is not and will never be recyclable. If anything, it might someday be compostable. A light bulb doesn’t go in the recycling bin either because that kind of glass is tempered differently from glass bottles and jars we use for food. And containers full of food? Well, eat the damn food that’s in there. Or compost it. Then rinse the container. You don’t have to scrub it, just rinse it. It’s not that hard. It’s not that time consuming.
It is a new habit which we have to develop and embrace. That’s all it is.
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