The bullshit of plastic recycling
I know a thing or two about positive feedback. At binit we’ve been deliberating how to design and gamify our UX to help people become serious about reducing their waste — would they shape up if we have them staring at their mountain of trash every time they log on? Or would they do better if we spared them the shock, and allow them to grow a forest, wherein with each improvement you get a tree, a flower or an animal moves in to live in your forest. Building a reward drip to drive positive behavior change. Vs shock them into waking up?*
This, though, is not a post about UX design. It’s about plastic. And gross human negligence, which is tied to how we’ve been conditioned as consumers.
Hyper convenience is about the only thing that matters nowadays. It matters so much that some would trade real sex for virtual. In fact, we’ve perfected it so much that we hardly have to think anymore, about anything. Or plan for anything. Everything comes prepackaged, single packaged, shelf stable. Inert, organic, and available 24/7/365.. And on top of it, it’s now all recyclable, that yogurt cup together with your guilty consciousness.
Municipal recycling has gotten with the program making sure we have our separate bins available in the homes. In the US it’s a three bin system for the most part, accommodating single stream recycling and composting. In Europe we have it more complicated, with as many as seven bins in Finland. And the impact of this newfound recycling craze? Questionable at best. Negative at worst.
Especially problematic is plastic. Only 9% of it is recycled, less than 5% in the US, and scientists have now figured out that during the process of washing of the plastic to prepare it for breaking and melting, microplastic particles are discharged into the wastewater stream.
“Researchers calculated that a single recycling facility could emit up to 6.5 million pounds of microplastic per year. Filtration works somewhat if particles are over 40 microns. But approximately 95 percent of the microplastics are under 10 microns, and 85 percent under 5 microns. In other words, recyclers trying to solve the plastics crisis may in fact be accidentally exacerbating the microplastics crisis, which is coating every corner of the environment with synthetic particles.“ — WIRED
There’s also the utility question. How valuable are these materials anyways when recycled? According to Richard Hutten, a Dutch designer and architect, the wastefulness of the modern economy was, and still is, deliberate, with companies deciding to make their products less sustainable in order to increase demand.
“Pretty much everything that we have in the economy today is designed for short lifespans and disposability,” he added. “We’re trying to recycle and recover materials that were never designed to be recovered, so the yields that we get from those types of activities are very low.”
It’s the disposable economy stupid! And we’re all victims, or naive enablers of this lie. Plastic is the dirty secret. But it’s the benefit of convenience we all seek, and believe we deserve, that is the big lie. Convenience boils down to two things: you no longer need to plan and you no longer need to think either. The convenience system surrounding you, from your supermarket, to online shopping, to take out food, to deliveries, coffee to go, Walt, Doordash etc, all exist to help make things ever easier, removing even the slightest friction, enabling you to do it all from the click of your phone.
The side effects of all this convenience are not always good. From making us fat and unhealthy, to robbing us of the time necessary to think — do I really want this, need it? And most importantly, what happens to it when I’m through with it? We feel able and in our right to do everything and more. Rush from one to the other. Consumer is king. No time to pause and question — is this sustainable? Why would we? When we have recycling! And this right here, is the deliberate dichotomy of recycling. It makes us believe that whatever we consume and recycle, as opposed to waste, has an equally successful afterlife. I’ll see you again kind of feeling when it comes to tossing out countless empty plastic bottles which you consume because installing a water filter system required too much thinning and planning. And why would you, think and plan, since recycling is so great?
But this feeling of I’m doing the right thing so let me be is totally misleading. By introducing recycling of plastics and convincing us to do so diligently, the municipality now has the onus of disposing of it in a way that doesn’t involve landfilling it locally or incineration. So they sell it off to a commercial third party, usually locally, who then sells it down the line all the way until that plastic bottle or bag ends up in an open landfill somewhere in Indonesia, or is floating in the rivers of Latin America towards the Pacific. Ever wondered how the Pacific plastic patch came to be? It’s our plastic — yours and mine, consumed in Europe and the US and shipped into fairway places to then be disposed in the most environmentally unfriendly way. And why? Because it has diminishing value compared to virgin plastic, and there are no tax penalties impose on production of new plastic.
The game changing solution, if we’re talking about reducing plastic waste, is not in recycling, but in Refusing new. Repairing the old. Reducing packaging. And Reusing the same; preferably choosing glass and metal over plastic if you need a container at all. And all four of these R are in our hands — as consumers we have the power to make a difference.
But not if we continue to believe that recycling works just fine and that it’s a sustainable practice with adequate returns on investment and material utility. Our consumer habits will not change. We’ll keep buying on impulse and buying single use packaging. And yet, we must reduce plastic consumption if we are to prevent plastic production from doubling in the next 25 years, and plastic pollution from growing to 2.75 billion metric tonnes of CO2 emissions.
On the other hand, let’s ponder for a second, if we were to accept that plastic recycling is utter bullshit, and we were to take away our dedicated plastics bin from underneath our sink, we might be more compelled to change our bad consumer habits. Because for one, you can’t unlearn what you already know, that landfilling and incineration of plastic is a bad idea. And now you also know, and maybe even accept, that recycling plastic is just as bad. So we’d be driven towards a third way, REFUSE. Stop buying plastic. Stop procuring it. Make your favorite brands find an alternative way to deliver their product to you, or ditch them. This would constitute real change, and we need real consumer change to make a difference and save our health and this planet.
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* PM me with any good ideas or insights.
