How many extra hours of TV can I get for recycling one can of beer?
Recycling is imperfect, and in many places archaic. This much we know. But what to do about it? How to fix it, and should we fix it? And does it matter, the effort we make at home to diligently separate our waste?
I am in the waste business. My entire livelihood and my future in more than one way depends on what you and I think about recycling. I struggle with the concept for many reasons.
Primarily, confusing and contradictory information coming from the packaging industry and my municipality. Two, lack of transparency — no information about where all this plastic and waste truly ends up. I, and most of the people I know, recycle diligently. But I also know that of all the plastic collected only 5% of it is recycled. So what happens to the rest? There’s a real information gap here that fuels frustration and suspicion. Third, the overall energy efficiency and time associated with recycling actually matter. I often feel stupid washing my yogurt cups and bottles knowing that most likely they won’t be recycled anyways.
I recently discovered that plastics manufactures print the recycle logo on every piece of plastic. For them it’s all recyclable. Maybe in an ideal world it is possible to recycle all plastic waste. But in the real world, in my municipality, and in yours, that’s not how it works. They can recycle some stuff, but not others, and they mostly recycle very little of the plastic we bother to separate. Why? The answer again is complex. It’s part machinery — outdated equipment. It’s partly due to the lack of financial incentives — recycled plastic is often more expensive and worse quality than new. And it’s part energy utility — the energy saved by recycling isn’t there.
And here’s where I had a mini aha moment. What if recycling is thought of as energy (Kilowatt hours) saved? I looked at my beer can on the table and thought, how many Kwh of energy do I save by recycling this one can of beer? It turns out I can watch two extra hours of TV — if I had one and TV watching was actually something I did — for every beer can recycled properly. Next I thought about plastics and energy? How much energy do I save by recycling a yogurt cup? Is the net effect the same? If not, which matters more, recycling metal or plastic, and how much more?
This is what I found: One ton of recycled aluminum saves 14,000 Kwh of energy. One ton of recycled plastic saves 5,774 Kwh of energy. And one ton of recycled newsprint saves 601 Kwh of energy.
By this comparison, all recycling matters, but it doesn’t matter equally! Until now I only saw recycling as a binary decision — blue or black bin. For me, recycling was a database problem and I was going to solve it by bridging the info gap with vision recognition technology and AI, which is something we’re building at binit, and it will be at the core of our user experience. But looking at recycling from an energy point of view, I am starting to think there is another way to help our users make on the spot decisions in a world of imperfect information, and feel good about their decisions.
If I think of recycling as a function of Kwh of energy not wasted, I can now reorder my trash into a new hierarchy, and really worry mostly about making sure that I recycle those items that offer the biggest energy savings. Recycling your beer can is 23X more valuable than recycling your newspaper. And I also found out that not all papers are equal. Office paper is worth more than newspaper, 7X more energy is saved when recycling office paper.
Here is a set of three easy to remember rules, which from an energy point of view, will make your recycling count: (1) recycle your metals. It matters a great deal. (2) Do your best with plastics. It can matter. And (3) don’t sweat the paper stuff. It doesn’t really matter all that much.
I started applying this rule in my home and it’s making me feel a lot less guilty and anxious about my recycling practice.
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