Recycling Insanity
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -- Narcotics Anonymous
The folks over at 99% Invisible have fallen into the above-mentioned trap regarding the folly of post-1970's recycling, in an interesting piece about a documentary that may have led to China's recent ban on imports of foreign "recyclables." The film, Plastic China, portrays the squalor of some of the modern rag-pickers this craze has produced:
At the intersection of our current technology levels and the value of these materials to the furtherance of human life (i.e., the lack thereof), this is exactly what saving everything we possibly can takes. The mask of respectability of recycling has finally been tugged at. Hooray!The movie provides a grim look at the actual process of breaking down materials, in an informal recycling facility. It shows the families cutting up plastic, melting, soaking it and turning it into a sludge -- then turning it into hardened pellets. The little girl washes her face in the gray plastic-polluted water and eats fish that have choked on bits of plastic. They live and work (and eat and sleep) near a plastic-shredding machine, inhaling dust and microparticles that are byproducts of the process. The whole village is enveloped in plastic detritus.
Image via Wikipedia.
But recycling is only one person in the unholy trinity still being worshiped at 99 Percent Invisible:
Somewhere along the way, key parts of the "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra got lost. We have lost track of reducing and reusing. Single-use products including straws, bags, cups and bottles are a big part of the problem, as are items made of multiple different materials (particularly ones that are hard to pull back apart, like toothpaste tubes).And so, predictably, just as one nation is stepping back from the abyss of wasted time that is modern recycling, they call for us to double down on the folly by doing more of the grunt work of recycling here and wasting even more money and effort kowtowing to the other two.
They -- and we -- would do well instead to consider the work of John Tierney, who also notes that some of the packaging we're supposed to "reduce" keeps food from spoiling, among other things. But I am getting ahead of myself, and I must first give the angels of 99 Percent Invisible their due, so to speak. I heartily agree with the conclusion of this article:
In the end, Operation National Sword Could be a wake-up call. But only if producers, consumers, and governments tune in and listen.It is, but not in the narrow sense of saving a mantra at all costs. As I noted early last year, "around the 1970s, hippies changed the goal of recycling from benefiting human life to preserving the natural world."
It's time to ask ourselves the same question the Chinese seem to have asked themselves when they saw a poor girl's life being wasted and degraded by this barbaric rite of slow human sacrifice: Why should we recycle? This is an important question, and the quality of your life depends on it.
-- CAV
2 comments:
Two things strike me about this.
First, much of the evil, scary plastic we use serves the purpose of reducing consumption. Modern packaging is a marvel of engineering, and has reduced waste due to breakage and damaged products tremendously. Imagine trying to ship something like a modern laptop, with its lithium-ion battery and rare-earth element-infused components without the benefit of plastic insulation! Or, look at halogen bulbs: without plastic the breakage rate would be astronomical, and each broken bulb results in an environmental crisis by the Left's standards.
Second, while the conditions of these Chinese factories are horrific by our standards, we should consider how they stack up against the standards of the people working there. We have to remember that the options are not "horrific working conditions" vs "nice, safe office jobs". Often the options are to work in these horrific conditions or starve to death. Subsistence farming in a third-world economy is a horrific existence, one that we in the West simply cannot imagine. We need to keep the full context in mind when we attempt to solve problems like these; if we simply try to resolve one issue (working conditions) without reference to the context that results in people opting to work there, we will only condemn these people to a slow death.
For examples of what I mean by that last paragraph, look at the organization Water for People. Many efforts to provide clean water for third-world countries fail because they focus on the problem, out of context. They install a system to provide clean water, then walk away--ignoring the fact that no one is available to fix the machine when it goes down, and no one can afford to buy the parts to fix it when it breaks. Water for People at least attempts to address those issues. (I'm not endorsing the charity, merely pointing to it to demonstrate the problems caused by ignoring context.)
Dinwar,
Your second point is worth keeping in mind, and reminds me of a point Andrew Bernstein made at length in The Capitalist Manifesto about factories during the industrial revolution. That focory may well have been a good alternative for that girl. That said, the context is that her conditions were made bad in the first place by the central planning in China's economy.
IIRC, Rand said of such cases something to the effect that Capitalism didn't cause poverty, it inhereted it.
Gus
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