My Mind's Ink

I am not a rabid environmentalist. You will not find me chained to a tree, or carrying a “save the whales” sign. Recognition that our current path cannot continue does not require extremist views, it simply requires a grasp of basic high school math and biology. Any closed biological system must find a balance or it collapses and the living things within it die.

Human beings are pushing our system out of balance in a time frame unprecedented in the Earth’s history. Greenhouse gases, coral reefs, rain forests, biological diversity, air quality, water quality, species extinction, erosion, we are pushing all of these factors and more in a negative direction. Every living system on the planet is in decline. A correction in these trends is inevitable.

Recycling to the Rescue

The symbol has become pervasive. Blue boxes, bins, and bags are everywhere inviting you to recycle your unwanted mess. Doing so makes you feel like you are doing your part. The problem is that we are accomplishing nothing.

Short-term thinking is my issue with recycling. It is accomplishes two things: First, it makes us feel like we are doing something. Second, it ensures that we do not really have to deal with the fundamental issues. We do not need to fix our problems, we just need to delay the crisis until we are dead.

Bottled Water

Bottled water is a great example to illustrate my point. Bottled water is a unnecessary industry. No one needs bottled water. People over 30, like myself, can remember the birth of bottled water. If you had told us 20 years ago that we would buy water in little bottles at more than twice the price of gasoline we would have rejected the idea as ridiculous. Yet here we are.

A huge industry like that producing bottled water has an impact on the environment. Shipping, packaging, marketing, factories, and plants all burning energy to produce green house gasses, industrial water and air discharge. If bottled water disappeared tomorrow, the environmental benefits would be huge and the negative impact on your life would be zero.

Canadians drink half a billion dollars of bottled water a year. We do so for a variety of reasons: perceptions of quality and safety, and convenience being high on the list. We drink our bottled water and feel OK about it because we recycle.

That is short term thinking. We have created a temporary container out of a permanent material. That plastic bottle will last, in one form or another, for hundreds of years. That material will not be recycled and remade into a useful object for a few hundred years. Even if you put that bottle in a blue bin, the material is eventually going to end up garbage.

The process begins immediately with a fact that few people seem to know. One hundred percent of plastic beverage containers are brand new. There is no utopia of recycling where all water bottles can be recycled and then be reborn as the next generation of bottles. That circle of arrows that represents the recycling industry is a lie. If you recycle a plastic bottle, it cannot be made into a new bottle. It must be downgraded to something else, like carpets or filling in pillows.

Bottled water is just an easy whipping boy because it is so obviously harmful and devoid of any value, but it represents the bigger picture. Temporary things create our entire lifestyle. Take out containers, coffee cups, paper napkins, packaging, and IKEA furniture. The bookcase you bought from IKEA can only be moved twice before it breaks down into fragments of particle board. How many objects in your home have been made to outlast you? More than five years? Why not?

The Solution

Continuing to buy products that don’t make sense, and trying to make ourselves feel good about it by recycling, is delusional. Producing bottled water does not make sense. Putting it in a blue bin does not change that. The answer is not to recycle an object. The answer is to recognize that we don’t need to make it at all. Recycling is not the answer. Producing less is.

If our product choices really affected our lives, we would make different ones. We will refuse to support any product that produces waste. Starbucks must design a coffee cup we can bury in our flower boxes as fertilizer. McDonalds needs to package their burgers in something our dog can eat. We, of course, will buy a cup that will last our whole life and simply drink our water out of the tap.

Environmental change currently appears optional. The environmental choices we make do not directly and immediately affect our health, our standard of living, or our pocket book. The effects are slow and easy to overlook. We need to make them immediate and pronounced.

We are destroying the place we live, but we are going about it in such a half assed manner that we are fooling ourselves into thinking progress is being made. We are taking part in a massive industrial orgy of one time use convenience products. There is no point in being coy about it.

We are addicted to a way of life that will kill us. We need to hit bottom so we realize the mess we are in. The faster we get there the better, so let’s quit messing around and do it already.

Throw everything out. Lets have plastic bottles up to our necks and push things to a point where throwing out a bag of garbage costs as much as your rent. Change created by altruism is lovely, but it is painfully slow. Change due to necessity is quick and decisive. They say it is the mother of invention, so lets generate some necessity.

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