The Emotions Behind Plastic Recycling
My mom’s house in southern Connecticut is beautiful. Just down the road is a nature preserve. It has grasslands, forests, estuaries, coves. People around here care about their yards and maintain luscious gardens. The neighbor across the street raises horses, cows, and alpacas. I love looking at all of this natural beauty on my walks.
What I don’t love looking at is all the litter on the sides of the road.
Dunkin Donuts cups in my mom’s hydrangeas. To-go boxes in my neighbor’s daffodils. How can this happen? Even on the walking paths in the nature preserve, I find beer cans and Mike’s hard lemonade bottles strewn everywhere. This rubbish is definitely just from rubbish-quality-people, I say to myself.
One morning, I took out the recycling for the trucks making their rounds. It was really pleasant outside so I figured I’d take in the morning air. As I stood in the garden watching the horses play, the recycling truck approached. I waved and they waved back, picking up my bin and dumping my recyclables into the truck. They drove off.
Then, in the corner of my eye, I saw movement in the truck’s wake. I walked over to what I saw, only to find the same 16 oz. strawberry packaging that I had just put out on the curb.
So… it was me? I’m the baddy? Not just me, but the neighbors? And whoever else who would mistakenly drink Dunkin coffee and then mistakenly put a Styrofoam cup in the recycling?
Staring pensively at the strawberry packaging, I recalled a webinar I had watched from an environmental consulting agency, Quantis, on plastic leakage. I had wondered how plastic leaks out into our land and waterways. Before this morning, I had conjured images of the people who bring liquor into the woods and irresponsible dump their waste on the side of the trails. But, as I picked up several other plastic recyclables that had flown out of the truck, I was forced to realize this view of public irresponsibility was largely an emotional view. And even worse, this view convinced me of a false fact that: all littering in my neighborhood is generated from irresponsible dumping. Recycling is broken because people are bad.
As I wrote this story, I was compelled to take pause on this idea of “emotional” facts. In the Quantis webinar I mentioned, the presenters even highlighted that their mission is to generate analysis based on science, rather than leaving culture and corporations to dictate their behavior through emotion-based facts. I took to this idea, but I didn’t realize I was already a perpetrator of emotional logic.
In talking to my friends about this experience, I unearthed their own emotional logic they had been telling themselves because of their past experiences. The most dangerous kind of emotion-based fact I uncovered is what I’m calling a “grey truth”, a fact that is partially influenced by emotion and partially influenced by a fact. Let’s take the common belief, “it’s not really worth recycling; most of it is thrown away anyways.” Yes, it’s true, according to this EPA study of municipal solid waste, a dismal 8% of plastic was recycled in 2017. But does this mean recycling is “not worth it”?
Intuitively, this sounds like only a part of the picture. In the coming months, I will research the value chain of recovering recyclable materials in an attempt to more concretely define recycling’s “worth”. But right now, to those readers who think recycling isn’t worth it: Why stop at the end result of the current state? If we applied this same logic to other challenges, would we be the technologically advanced society that we are today? Can you imagine saying, “it’s not worth setting up computations with a computer; they can only hold 8% of the data that a human mind can and take up the entire room”?
