Protecting against foreign danger, today’s new Chinese Wall drives our waste products away and pushes Canadian recycling expenditures up as much as 40 percent. Sudden appearance of such huge new costs quickly reinstates trash to peoples’ minds with crisis immediacy.
At street level despair sets in as folks discover that downstream from our blue bins Canada yearly generates 3.2 million metric tons of plastic waste, but of that just 9 percent – yes, that’s only nine – actually gets recycled. One can now aptly re-imagine those familiar trucks hauling away our weekly bin contributions as merely the start of a conveyor belt running into some twilight zone of infinity.
Municipalities, facing the fact that “contaminated” Canadian recyclables are akin to garbage, just as are the random mixed materials baled together as one, are realizing that our old garbage dump era’s “out of sight, out of mind” ethos never was really eliminated.
Just as serious, however, is the reality that even “quality” recyclables are mounting, untouched. The crisis is far deeper than the economic and physical void created by Asians rejecting our unwanted waste. We are now in a holding pattern, generating ever more containers and warehouses crammed with hard-to-recycle packaging.
Individuals are generally doing their bit, despite major “bin sins” of totally inappropriate objects that halt sorting machinery, and binned items like cardboard soiled with food waste, extremely hard to recycle confection wrappers, plastic bags and labels, and un-rinsed containers that are effectively garbage.
Municipalities, too, have generally been trying their best. In the opening phase of the current Green Age, recycling plants paid municipalities for the material, providing an economic rationale for cities and towns to engage in waste streaming. Three months ago Sims Municipal Recycling Company in Brooklyn, facing extra handling costs and diminishing demand for its own end-product, refused Canadian municipal plastic waste, even if the plastics were delivered to its New York plant for free. That showed how indispensible components of the system are no longer functional. In Canada, recycling plants now charge $40 a metric ton just to take municipal plastic refuse.
The scale of this global problem is growing. With 7 billion people now on the planet (compared with a mere 2 billion as recently as the 1960s), with excessive packaging of so many more consumer and commercial products, with our centuries-old impulse to just chuck waste somewhere else out of sight resilient still, with recipient countries and recycling plants reflecting the outsized scale of contemporary economic and environmental waste practices, radical changes are coming.
Next week’s column will examines how “landfill sites” fit into this picture.
