Recycling is a Broken System
Recycling is one of the most successful national campaigns in the last century, but not in terms of reducing waste or saving the environment. In day-to-day life, the act of recycling feels dutiful, sometimes noble; as they say, “recycling is a little effort that makes a big difference”. However,
on a global scale, recycling operations are severely underinvested and over-trusted, serving
merely as effective marketing campaigns to displace environmental burdens from corporations
onto individuals and divert attention from addressing the reason we ever needed to recycle in
the first place.
Like a frog in boiling water, we have allowed ourselves to remain utterly oblivious to the growing threat of environmental destruction. We have comfortably relied upon outdated recycling initiatives even as they become increasingly insufficient for the scale that corporations are outputting waste through excessive packaging, planned obsolescence, and unnecessary single-use products. The environmental era of the 1970s brought recycling into the mainstream of American life following a national outcry for regulation of environmental pollution. Recycling initiatives were meant to reduce waste in landfills and develop a circular economy; however, corporations have shamelessly taken advantage of the ‘green appeal’ of recycling as a cop-out to produce even more single-use products and excessively wasteful packaging. These products are extremely profitable for corporations thanks to their convenience and fulfillment of the consumerist desires of society.
The concept of recycling is a valuable part of our approach to addressing environmental crises, but as society has evolved over the last half century and continues to consume and dispose of more material resources than ever before, we cannot become complacent in reforming the harmful manufacturing practices and consumer habits that have fueled this consumption.
Here is what we ask our of leaders:
We do not need any more recycling campaigns or marketing schemes that greenwash harmful brands and consumerist habits.
We do not need more recycling streams and corporations who buy our waste in pursuit of economic profit.
We do not need more products that can be recycled.
What we need is more products and goods that do not need to be recycled because they are sustainably produced and made to last.
What we need is for governing bodies to enforce rules related to Extended Producer Responsibility to hold corporations accountable for the harm they cause.
What we need is for corporations to comprehensively reevaluate the materials and methods they use in product design and manufacturing to reduce material waste in the consumer cycle.
To restructure the capitalist and consumerist norms of society will be no easy feat, but it is far past the time for our leaders to emerge from the comforts of complacency to face the causes of our impending environmental destruction. It is time for the leaders of tomorrow to force a radical restructuring of our government’s role in environmental protection and the role of corporations in the products they design, manufacture, and market to us, the people of this Earth.
