The death of recycling.

• Author: Palmer, Paul
• Position: Biodevastation

Recycling has become lazy, relying on yesterday's methods and advancing no new ideas to inspire the public. The practitioners have become used to income derived from the low grade collection of garbage. Their method is to pick away at garbage streams recapturing small amounts of smashed up low-grade materials. Alternatively they profit by exacting garbage dumping surcharges, resembling guilt taxes, from the dumpers. They have formed close alliances with the garbage industry, the two often being indistinguishable. Since no approach to conservation that relies on harvesting garbage can ever threaten the garbage paradigm, they have no way to inspire the public. They do promote themselves mendaciously as being fundamentally opposed to garbage, but that ideology is merely a holdover from a time when recycling was young. The contradiction is disturbing to even casual observers.

What would you think about a gigantic piece of the environmental movement, involving trillions of dollars worth of resources annually in this country alone, that environmentalists ignore? The way in which resources are used to create products is exactly such an item. After working in this field for thirty years, I have seen that environmentalists are afraid to deal with industrial production because they don't understand it. It seems like a technical subject that they have no hope of getting a handle on. If a single resource is badly harvested, like old growth trees, they will organize. If the process produces an obvious pollution, they will demand regulation to correct it. But there it stops. The way in which products are designed specifically for waste is simply not on their screen.

In the United States, recycling as a theory of resource management arose in the nineteen seventies. Since that time, no new theory or even interpretation has been put forward until today.

Three major developments should be noted.

First, the garbage industry realized that it could take over the movement for recycling, turning it into a division of garbage management, finally paying recyclers a surcharge to co-opt them.

Second, the recyclers accepted the preeminence of the garbage industry and dropped any notion of replacing or closing dumps.

Third, a few progressive individuals and organizations began to discuss a new resource management plan to which they gave the name zero waste. (1), (2), (3)

At some point, the recyclers, now working for garbage management, saw that zero waste could become a slogan that appeared to the public to be a higher theory of resources. Because of their immersion in the recycling paradigm as an ultimate theory, they were actually unable to put flesh on the bones of the zero waste approach, but they began to spread the bare slogan. On the ground, nothing changed. The recyclers went to a number of jurisdictions (several California cities especially) and urged the cities to join them in putting forward the facade of a new resource management plan, which a number of cities did. In actuality, the new plans concerned Zero Waste in name only. They proposed only more recycling.

How does zero waste differ from recycling?

What should have been in such plans, that would have revealed a truly new theory of resource conservation? The essence of the new synthesis can be summed up in one pregnant phrase: redesign for reuse. But what kind of redesign for what kind of reuse? That is where the new theory flexes its muscles.

The basic problem that has always plagued recycling is that it accepts garbage creation as fundamental. Zero waste strategies reject garbage creation as a failure, actually an abomination that threatens the planet, an historical accident, a politically motivated defect in the design of our industrial-commercial system of production. Zero waste actually goes deeper in that it rejects waste of every kind at every stage of production. Zero waste...