Reduce and reuse before turning to recycling
As the city of Chesapeake contemplates ending its curbside recycling program, we have an opportunity to look at our “disposable society.”
We all have a love affair with convenience and quick gratification, a love affair that businesses are happy to foster. The result is a tsunami of plastic bags, bottles, cups, straws, wrappers and other packaging for our convenience. Knowing that most people care about the health of the environment, manufacturers emboss most of these plastics with happy recycling triangle and the message to “Please recycle.” And to make it convenient to recycle, the industry promotes “singlestream recycling,” the blue bins in Chesapeake, to handle our recycling needs.
And people try to be good. They want to put all these plastics and other packaging into the blue bin to get recycled. But, except perhaps for aluminum cans, recycling isn’t that easy. Paper contaminated by food or grease is worse than useless and plastics are particularly hard to recycle. There are many different kinds of plastic and they can’t be mixed together. Only plastic bottles are recyclable in the blue bins.
Per a briefing from the city manager to the City Council, the end result is that 24% of the stuff, by weight, that is placed in the Chesapeake’s blue bin ends up as trash. Another 18% is glass, which is recyclable but there is no local facility that handles it, so it also ends up as trash. Financially, it is costing Chesapeake twice as much per ton of waste to do blue-bin recycling as opposed to just hauling it all straight to the dump. Perhaps it makes people feel good that they “recycled,” but the end result is still an ever-growing mass of trash.
Of the plastics that are bundled for recycling, much of it ends up in huge stockpiles awaiting shipment and processing. There is really only a market for plastic bottles and even those aren’t recycled back into bottles, but rather downcycled into something like carpeting and polyester. And it is a usually cheaper and easier for the packaging industry to make new plastic from oil and gas than to use recycled materials. Statistics at a global level show only about 9% of plastic ever gets recycled. And every year we produce ever more plastic that ends up in landfills — or worse on our streets, parks, shorelines and waterways.
If Chesapeake decides to discontinue the blue-bin recycling, it must use this as a teaching moment and an opportunity to do better. We need to be honest with people that our plastic problem won’t be easily solved by tossing it into a blue bin. We need to do outreach to teach people to make choices that avoid the use of singleuse plastic packaging. The city of Chesapeake and Chesapeake Public Schools should look at their procurement to cut out single-use plastics wherever possible. And Chesapeake should provide an alternative drop off site for folks who care to drop off their recyclables, preferably where people pre-sort the recyclables to separate out paper, cardboard, cans and plastic, to hopefully make the process cleaner and more cost effective.
Chesapeake should also join other localities across Virginia that have already implemented a 5-cent plastic bag fee. Such a fee would encourage people to avoid plastic bags and could raise several hundred thousand dollars for Chesapeake to support environmental cleanup, litter and pollution mitigation, environmental education efforts, and to provide reusable bags to low-income residents. Such a fee is completely avoidable by residents who simply skip the bag, which is the whole point.
The mantra was always supposed to be reduce, reuse and only then recycle. We need to shift our focus back to reducing the plastics and packaging that we need. We need to shift toward reusable and sustainable methods, and then have recycling programs that are truly effective.