May
2006
Waste
and Citizenship: What an Individual Can Do About the Garbage Problem
By Samantha MacBride |
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Aluminum Cans. Photo by Samantha MacBride |
New York City’s residential recycling program has been back in
full swing for nearly two years, and residents are recycling as much
as before the 2003-2004 program cuts. Today, according to the 2006 Fiscal
NY Mayor’s Management Report, about 20 percent of what New Yorkers
put out at the curb is not going to disposal, but re-entering the stream
of commerce through recycling. A recent study of the materials that make
up NYC’s waste suggests that there isn’t too much farther “traditional” recycling
can go. Only a third of what residents throw out in total consists
of paper, metal, glass and plastic recyclables to begin with.
Yet in New York, as elsewhere, there is still a serious garbage problem. Residents
of industrially-zoned neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens see, smell
and breathe in waste flows every day, as city sanitation trucks converge on transfer
stations to dump trash. Privately contracted tractor trailers (and to a much
lesser extent trains) take over from there. Belching exhaust, fleets of 18-wheelers
haul their loads to points near and far, for landfilling and incineration by
waste management corporations. Money and natural resources are spent; pollution
is generated; and nothing of beauty or utility results.
Recycling as we currently know it does very little to solve this problem.
In certain instances, it saves public money and mitigates some of the pollution
from waste transport and disposal. But its impacts shouldn’t be exaggerated.
The savings in resources or energy that come from recycling—in the face
of a globalized materials economy predicated on geometrically expanding growth
rates—are minimal. And because what is recycled corresponds to its
marketability, not its toxicity, recycling only mildly reduces the hazards
associated with
disposal.
The Politics of Trash
What is to be done? A common response is that we must get people to become
aware of the impact their lifestyles have on the creation of waste, and alter
their
consumption and waste generation behavior. Each of us should recycle more,
buy less, compost and reuse things. Yet this familiar argument is misfocused
on the
individual as the agent of social change. Trash and the pollution that attends
it emanate first and foremost from systems of production that exist to make
profit. Addressing the garbage problem requires strong and sustained intervention
at
large scales, to regulate the freedom of the firms that control extraction,
production and distribution of goods that end up as waste. Those firms have
fought tooth
and nail against anything that threatens profit. Moreover, it is in their
interest to promote individually-focused actions, like more recycling or
green purchasing,
in place of policies and programs that limit their autonomy, such as bottle
bills, take-back requirements or toxics bans. Encouraging individuals to “make
a difference,” in contrast, poses no threat to producer autonomy, and
often creates new opportunities for profit.
Producers have a great advantage here because the current politics of trash
do not align neatly with right/left politics. Social conservatives stress
personal accountability for one’s actions; free-marketeers see consumer sovereignty
as the only legitimate brake on the excesses of industrial production. Neither
is particularly concerned about waste or other ecological issues. Nonetheless,
these right-wing concepts get mobilized by the environmental movement when individuals
are called upon to think more and buy less. Among greens, support for “polluter
pays” approaches—targeting the production system rather than the
individual consumer—are compromised by voluntarism, while natural capitalism—a
perspective that advocates harmonious relationships with enlightened segments
of industry bent on good design—is gaining more credence among progressive
waste activists. The expectation is that the next generation of corporations
will realize a moral imperative to protect the earth and will figure out how
to make profits while doing so. The agents of change will be visionary eco-entrepreneurs
and savvy green consumers—individuals, again.
It’s not easy to put the role of the individual into perspective when the
system seems to be as much “us” as it is institutions, practices,
history and the bottom line. To challenge this primacy of the personal role in
waste solutions is, I’ve learned, just as subversive among the environmentalist
left as it is among proponents of a thousand points of light. “Big government,” the
originator of some of the most influential acts to regulate environmental
excesses in the 70s, is now mistrusted no less by the grassroots than the
libertarian
right. Producers have achieved their goal: an ecologically-minded focus on
the individual serves as a diversion from contemplation of larger scale,
systemic change.
Consider how eco-heretical this sounds: when we recycle, we do not save a
tree because the harvesting of trees and production of paper does not diminish
in
response to our return of wastepaper to the commodity stream. As a ton of
recycled paper is marketed, a quantity of trees somewhere is not correspondingly
protected.
Production just isn’t organized on such a substitution basis. Instead,
the harvesting of timber, both virgin and plantation, expands apace with the
use of recycled paper. This is what it means to live in a global economy predicated
on growth. So although recycling may slightly diminish our utilization of trees,
it doesn’t save them. And given that we desperately do need to “save” (in
all of the complexity this means) our ecosystems—both those that do and
do not include trees—the continued environmentalist claim of tree-saving
is naïve and misleading.
When I express such heresy to my green colleagues, they assume I am saying we
should stop recycling as it is currently practiced. I am not. What I do advocate
is a clear-headed strategy in which a more ample, informed, and critical type
of personal action, one collectively geared towards countering producer power,
is the goal. Through speaking, thinking, working up of ideas, dialogue and even
protest, we must bring topics to the policy agenda that are hard to talk about
under conditions of status quo. Through experimentation, enterprise and teaching,
we must translate those topics into practice. There is precedent for such an
approach. It has taken the environmental justice movement decades to convey the
concept that historical patterns of discrimination can be reproduced bureaucratically
through zoning, housing and industrial development policies. Slowly, and so far
incompletely, this message made active is changing the way waste is handled.
It’s tempting to turn to consuming our way out of the problem, seeking “win-win” natural
capital solutions. Instead, we need to talk about the forces that make wastes
and toxics an inescapable part of our daily lives—forces of globalized
production as they intersect with the life and work of the city.
Samantha MacBride teaches Urban Environmentalism at New York University and is
a policy analyst for waste issues in municipal governance. Contact: samantha.macbride@nyu.edu.
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