THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  For months, the mayor’s office faxed me a daily schedule of the mayor’s events. (It was easily available upon request—a policy that may have since been revisited.) We ensured that groups of students, Quakers, or Haitians greeted him at each event with a gigantic banner: “MAYOR RENDELL: Do the right thing, bring the ash home.” At the airport, celebrating a new direct flight to the Netherlands, there we were. At a gala at a museum, guests in tuxedos and evening gowns all passed the banner on the way from their limos to the entrance.

  One morning, going over the fax of Mayor Rendell’s appearances, I was delighted to see that that very evening he’d be in D.C., where I was. The city of Philadelphia was hosting an event at a big hotel on Capitol Hill. My friends Dana Clark and Heidi Quante and I got dressed up and headed there. It’s a funny thing to put on high heels in an effort to get toxic ash cleaned up. We lingered at the entrance to the gigantic ballroom where the party was held, listening to the band and waiting for the right moment to make our move. Mayor Rendell, his wife, and some other local politicos were at the door greeting each person as they entered. As soon as the news cameras turned to Mayor Rendell, my friends and I went through the line. When I got to the mayor, I told him about the toxic ash left on the beach. I held his hand so tightly he couldn’t get away, while Heidi pinned a bright red badge on his lapel that said: “Mayor Rendell, do the right thing, BRING THE ASH HOME.” He brushed me aside, only to find the next young woman in line demand the same thing. And the next. Finally he said, “OK, I’ll give fifty thousand dollars and not a penny more.”

  Fifty thousand dollars was only a fraction of the $600,000 estimated for the cleanup, but we nonetheless felt like celebrating. So we joined the party. Amazingly, no one kicked us out. We strolled around the ballroom, handing out flyers and explaining the situation to people who asked us about our big red badges. One gentleman from my hometown of Seattle was especially interested and asked us lots of questions. Shortly thereafter, the music stopped and the mayor took the stage, welcoming people and extolling the virtues of Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. To our surprise, the guy from Seattle began yelling, “Bring the ash home!” We joined him and kept it up until the security guards made it known we had overstayed our welcome.

  Through a series of complicated negotiations, a deal was finally reached to bring the ash back to the United States. On April 5, 2000, what was left of the ash was loaded onto a ship and removed from Gonaïves. Today there’s a big billboard in its place that reads “Toxic Dumping in Haiti: Never Again.”

  No Away In Sight

  After years of traveling around investigating international waste dumping and meeting the people whose communities had been dumped on, my conviction was unshakable. It is simply wrong for the world’s richest countries to dump hazardous waste on the world’s poorest ones. Period. I remember talking to a U.S. congressional representative who told me I should find a compromise position. Like what? It is OK to dump on adults, but not kids? Or on Asians, but not Africans? No way. If it is too hazardous for my child, it is too hazardous for any child, anywhere.

  Outraged by international waste trade scandals around the world, many countries have signed on to a United Nations convention called the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal. The Basel Convention was adopted on March 22, 1989, and went into force on May 5, 1992. In its first iteration, the convention regulated, rather than banned, waste exports from wealthy countries to poorer ones.122 Around the world, human rights activists, environmentalists, and representatives of developing countries (i.e., the targets of waste traffickers) condemned the convention for “legalizing toxic waste.” Fortunately, the treaty was updated with a provision banning waste exports from the worlds’ richest countries (primarily OECD members) to less wealthy ones (non-OECD countries), effective January 1, 1998.123 The United States is the only industrialized country in the world that hasn’t yet ratified the Basel Convention.

  While Basel is a tremendous victory, the battle is not yet over. Some countries and business associations continue to argue for exemptions from the ban for certain waste streams. An NGO watchdog group, the Basel Action Network, monitors the Basel Convention and publishes a list of entities working to undermine the ban. Whole countries are on the list: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, and so are a number of trade associations: the International Council on Mining and Metals, the International Chamber of Commerce, and the United Nations Center for Trade and Development. To get involved and keep waste from being dumped on unsuspecting communities worldwide, visit the Basel Action Network at www.ban.org.

  And Then There’s Recycling

  Recycling is amazing in its ability to stir people—some people are inspired by it, many proud of it, others bored, cynical, or even angered by it. I’ve gone through all those stages; in fact, I go through most of those stages on a daily basis.

  Like many people, my earliest relationship with environmental causes was through recycling—starting in childhood. This was in the day prior to curbside recycling programs, so my mother had us kids collect our newspapers, bottles, and cans, pile them into the station wagon, and drive them up to the collection center at the local grocery store parking lot. I remember the heavy bundles and the rainbow paintings on the side of the storage sheds. I recall feeling good putting the bottles in the correct color-coded bins. I am not alone in having experienced that; around the world, many people recognize the good feeling that they get from recycling.

  The feel-good aspect is at the heart of much of the debate about recycling. Is recycling a con that keeps us deluded into feeling like we’re helping the planet while leaving industry free to keep churning out ever more badly designed toxic Stuff? Heather Rogers, author of a book about garbage called Gone Tomorrow, writes that “industry accepted recycling in lieu of more radical changes like bans on certain materials and individual processes, production controls, minimum standards for product durability, and higher standards for resource extraction.”124

  Or is recycling a good first step into broader awareness and activism on sustainability issues; a gateway experience to get people interested and then guide them along to taking more strategic and effective action? Neil Seldman, president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, who has chronicled recycling in the United States for three decades, says that recycling has the power to transform industry: “It may have to do with one of society’s most mundane problems, garbage, or discarded materials, but its implications go to the heart of our industrial system.”125

  Actually, I believe it’s both. Recycling can lull us into believing we have done our part while nothing, really, has changed. And recycling can play an important role in the transformation to a more sustainable and more just economy.

  The Good

  In 2007—the most recent year for which data is available—people in the United States generated 254 million tons of trash, of which 85 million tons—or about a third—was recycled.126

  The environmental benefits are obvious. Recycling keeps materials in use, thus reducing the demand for extracting and producing new materials and avoiding—or more likely delaying—the point at which the materials become waste. Reducing harvesting, mining, and hauling resources, as well as the production of new Stuff, can reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that even our meager 33.4 percent recycling rate in the United States results in an annual benefit of 193 million metric tons of CO2 reduction, which is equivalent to removing 35 million passenger vehicles from the road.127

  And those CO2 reductions are just the start. Recycling also creates more jobs—and better ones—than other waste management options. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Washington, D.C., think tank specializing in waste and economic development, estimates that for every one hundred jobs created in recycling, just ten were lost in waste hauling.128

  The Questionable

  However, considering t
hat it would be possible to make 100 percent of our Stuff so that it could be easily and safely reused, recycled, or composted, 33 percent is a pretty lame recycling rate. It’s especially alarming when we look at the data for waste generation. Yes, recycling is increasing, but so is total waste produced on both a national and per-capita level.

  Our goal should not be to recycle more, but to waste less. Focusing on the wrong end of the question can point our efforts in the wrong direction. For example, I heard about a recycling contest in which a number of U.S. colleges participated to see who could collect the most plastic bottles to recycle. At one school, kids went to Costco and bought bulk boxes of single-serving water bottles in order to win. The same nutty dynamic is happening anywhere people are measuring progress by an increase in recycling rather than a decrease in waste.

  At a recycling conference I attended recently, I learned about RecycleBank, a program that weighs residents’ recycling bins at the curb and awards people points for heavier bins. That means the neighbor who buys cases of single-serving bottled water gets points over the one who installed a filter and drinks tap water in reusable containers! But wait, there’s more. Guess what you get for those points? More Stuff! Residents cash in those points for goods at partner retailers including Target, IKEA, Foot Locker, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Who invented these programs—Keep America Beautiful?

  Programs like this give recycling a bad name, by encouraging more consumption and more waste. They allow producers to escape responsibility for their wasteful packaging and, perversely, subsidize the generation of disposable Stuff. And perhaps worse of all, programs like this claim to be making real change.

  The Ugly

  Despite its rainbow-bright image, recycling is often a dirty process. If Stuff contains toxic components, then recycling perpetuates them, exposing recycling workers and yet another round of consumers and community residents to potential health threats. Even if the material isn’t toxic, large-scale municipal recycling requires trucks and factories that use a lot of energy and create more waste. Just because it’s called recycling doesn’t mean it’s green. As currently practiced, recycling is largely controlled by huge waste hauling companies like Waste Management, Inc., which operates facilities for both recycling and wasting (and whose profit is far higher for the wasting part).

  BIOPLASTICS: AN OXYMORON OR A SIGN OF HOPE?

  Currently most plastics are made from petroleum and a host of chemicals, many toxic. We have to figure out how to meet our needs using materials that are renewable, safe, and ecologically sound. So what about bioplastics?

  There are two generations of contemporary bioplastics (I am not counting some of the early plastics that were made from plant material, like cellophane, which was originally made from cellulose from wood pulp). The first generation was what I call the Total Scam Round of Biodegradable Plastics and the second generation is what I call the Jury’s Still Out Round of Biodegradable Plastics.

  Round One: By the late 1980s, garbage was on the alarmed American public’s radar screen. In response, Mobil Chemical Company, producer of Hefty brand plastic garbage bags, mixed cornstarch with petroleum plastic and declared its bags “biodegradable.” Mobil’s spokespeople actually admitted this was just a PR stunt, not any kind of substantive claim regarding biodegradability.129

  Environmental groups, scientists, and even some state governments were outraged by Mobil’s absurd claim. Within a couple years, lawsuits filed by seven states, as well as an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), forced Mobil to drop its “biodegradable” label.130

  Round Two: Today, many companies make and use plastics that are produced 100 percent from plants—corn, potatoes, agricultural waste. These bioplastics are being used in food packaging, water bottles, and even computers, cell phones, and some car parts. Are these new bioplastics truly sustainable? Or do they just reinforce our disposability culture and infrastructure?

  Unfortunately, right now the crops that make up today’s bioplastics are mostly grown in huge centralized farms, with heavy inputs of pesticides and fossil fuels, using genetically modified organisms and poorly paid farmworkers. Some of them use food-grade crops that could be used, duh, for food, rather than the single-serving containers for which much bioplastic is utilized.

  And even though they are technically compostable, that’s only in large-scale composting operations that reach the desired conditions for them to degrade. As an experiment, I put a bioplastic cup and some cutlery in my backyard bin four years ago and none have even the slightest hole in them yet. Bioplastics often end up in the regular trash or mucking up recycling programs since they have very different properties from other plastic containers and have to be sorted out before recycling.

  The jury is still out on whether bioplastics could be made in a truly sustainable way that supports a reduction in packaging and avoids single-use packaging completely; that supports small farmers and farmworkers; that adheres to the principles of green chemistry; and that avoids fossil fuel use. There’s a great group called the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative that’s working on this very issue.

  Also, much of our waste collected for recycling is exported overseas, especially to Asia, where environmental and worker safety laws are weaker and less well enforced. I’ve tracked plastic waste, used car batteries, e-waste, and other toxic-containing components of our municipal waste to Bangladesh, India, China, Indonesia, and other places. I’ve snuck into facilities (in various disguises!) to get a firsthand look at what happens to our waste overseas. The awful conditions I witnessed are not what conscientious individuals in the United States have in mind when they diligently wash out their plastic bottles or return their used car batteries.

  Another complaint about recycling is that it often isn’t even recycling but is actually something called downcycling. True recycling achieves a circular closed loop production process (a bottle into a bottle into a bottle), while downcycling just makes Stuff into a lower-grade material and a secondary product (a plastic jug into carpet backing). At best, downcycling reduces the need for virgin ingredients for the secondary item, but it never reduces the resources needed to make a replacement for the original item. In fact, by being able to advertise a product as “recyclable,” the demand for that first item may actually rise, which, ironically, is more of a resource drain.

  The classic example of this is plastic—where the industry cleverly appropriated the popular “chasing arrows” recycling logo and added to it the numbers 1 to 9 to indicate the grade of plastic. As Heather Rogers points out in Gone Tomorrow, this “misleadingly telegraphed to the voting consumer that these containers were recyclable and perhaps had even been manufactured with reprocessed materials.”131 For the record, it is extremely difficult to actually recycle plastics; almost always, they are downcycled. If you’re curious, ask your local recycler what it is doing with those bottles it picks up—are they being made into new bottles or shipped off to China, where they’re turned into some secondary product?

  Dr. Paul Connett says that “recycling is an admission of defeat; an admission that we were not clever enough or didn’t care enough to design it to be more durable, to repair it, or to avoid using it in the first place.”132 It’s not that recycling itself is bad, but our overemphasis on it is a problem. There is a reason recycling comes third in the eco mantra “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” Recycling is the last thing we should do with our Stuff, not the first. As a last resort, recycling is better than landfill or incineration for sure. And hats off to those dedicated people who have built and voraciously defended the recycling infrastructure that does exist in this country. Let’s use that infrastructure when our backs are against the wall, when we’re out of better options and have to chuck something.

  Unfortunately though, recycling is most often not seen as a last resort, but as the primary environmental duty of an engaged citizen. It’s the number-one way people demonstrate their environmental commitment. In fact, more people recycle than vote regula
rly in this country! I can’t tell you how many times, when I get asked what I do for a living, people respond with a proud, “Oh, I recycle!” And while it’s good that they do, there must be greater awareness of the limitations of recycling, as well as widespread understanding of the other things that must happen to solve our problems with waste.

  It is this aspect of recycling that most irritates those with a broader systemic understanding of the problems and broader vision for change. Recycling is easy: it can be done without ever raising questions about the inherent problems with current systems of production and consumption, about the long-term sustainability of a growth-obsessed economic model or about equitable distribution of the planet’s resources. Clearly, sorting used bottles and papers into a blue bin is not going to fundamentally change, or even challenge, the massive negative impacts of the way we extract, make, distribute, use, and share or don’t share all the Stuff in our lives. In fact, because it makes us feel good, because it makes us feel like we’re doing something useful, the worry is that recycling may actually bolster those very patterns of production and consumption that are trashing the planet and distract us from working for deeper change.

  Recycling Done Right

  But does all this mean we should abandon recycling? No way!

  I think the way to go is to look at our waste and figure out who is responsible for what.