Friday, March 11, 2005

Recycling: A Worst Case Scenario

The following is based on the observation of humans when they’re forced to do something.

Let’s look at a worst case scenario for mandatory, fee-based curbside recycling. We’ll start by looking at what we know:

We know that two City Councilmen, who are also business owners, report that their business trash bins are always full of other people’s trash. People either can’t afford, or won’t pay, to have their trash hauled away, so they dump it in a handy business’s container.

We know that when my previous employer had paper recycling with bins marked for white paper, greenbar paper and colored paper, people paid absolutely no attention to the different categories and not only mixed up the different kinds of paper, but also threw in plastic candy wrappers, newspapers, and the kraft paper wrappers that packaged reams of copy paper. The end result was a contaminated waste product that sold for far less money than it would have had it been sorted correctly. Remember this was in a fairly controlled environment. The employees were, in a sense, recycling as part of their job duties.

We know from the comments of a gentleman at the Recycling Forum on March 5, 2005 that when the State Hospital was burning newspapers in some sort of heating plant, they were contaminated with bottles which shattered when the newspapers were shredded prior to burning and which caused lethal lung problems for several of his co-workers.

Based on these observations, I predict that the following will happen:

Some people who don’t want to be bothered and who can easily afford the fee, will not participate at all.

Some people, not really wanting to be bothered with recycling, will put a token newspaper or pop can into the recycling containers, and put the rest in with their regular trash. This will hurt the recycling program and it won’t do much to reduce the amount of material going into the landfills.

Some people, not seeing any difference between recyclables and other trash, and figuring that they must pay for the recycling, will put all their trash into the recycling containers and cancel their trash pickup services. This will hurt the recycling program and the trash haulers.

Others won’t pay attention to the fine points and will simplify the recycling to include all paper, including slick ads and junk mail; all glass, including broken Pyrex; and all plastics, including unrecyclable numbers. Again, the result will be a contaminated, and probably unusable, waste product.

And you will have some people who will resent the mandates of the City and deliberately put inappropriate items into the recyclables.

Other people won’t rinse containers or remove labels before putting items into the recycling bins. If recycling isn’t done every week, a certain number of compulsively neat people will only put out a a few days’ worth of recyclables, and put the rest into their other trash pickup because they can’t stand to have a pile of newspapers or few empty bottles sitting around for a week or two. Pueblo has a lot of small homes where adding three or four recycling containers will take up very valuable space. My home is very large, but it was built in an era when people burned their trash every day or two and there’s barely room for a standard-sized waste can in the kitchen, let alone a stack of recycling bins.

By mandating recycling and asking people to pay a fee, the City is very likely setting up the program to fail.