Posted on 03/12/2002 8:09:06 AM PST by gridlock
A lot of the 1970's seems pretty remote these days. The Led Zeppelin records gather dust. High- mileage economy cars and low thermostats to conserve energy have given way to cheap gasoline and sport utility vehicles. Afros and "Have a Nice Day" buttons are the stuff of camp and kitsch.
But recycling lives on.
From its early roots after the first Earth Day in 1970, when parking lot recycling centers began popping up, reuse became the middle-American expression of environmental awareness. Recycling, its supporters believed, was a tiny lever that could work its way into the average American household — and consciousness — and through repetition and habit forge the realization that throwaway culture has its costs, that packaging matters, and that using less is probably a good thing.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg now says recycling is rather more earthbound than that: it's about making the budget numbers work. Some recycling makes sense, specifically paper, which generates revenue for New York City, he said. But glass, metal and plastic recycling costs money, and under the mayor's budget plan is to be dropped, perhaps to be brought back when New York can better afford it.
Few people dispute Mr. Bloomberg's assertion that tough times demand tough choices. But to a great degree, experts in consumer behavior say, the mayor's proposal — and the anguished reaction that some people have had to it — also says a lot about the long strange trip that recycling has been through over the years.
Psychologists do not have a firm answer why saving and sorting took such root in the American psyche. Some think that it tapped into a frugal frontier impulse that is also behind the phenomenon of swap meets and garage sales, that one person's junk must surely be good for something. Others say it became a crutch, a way for Americans to feel as if they were contributing to the environment without actually changing their consumption-driven behavior. In any case, it is often said that more Americans recycle than vote.
But gradually, through the 80's and 90's, the basis of considering recycling's value also began to change. Giant corporations like Waste Management took over much of the business, introducing tools of market analysis that would have seemed alien a decade earlier. Cities like New York continued to spend millions of dollars to advertise recycling's civic virtues, but increasingly, if quietly, the question was no longer did recycling do good, but did it do well.
"What's happened over time and what we're dealing with now is that the initial spirit of recycling has been eliminated," said Michael Lounsbury, an assistant professor of sociology at Cornell University who studies industrial and labor organizations. "Decisions are made on very narrow cost-benefit calculations."
People like Dr. Lounsbury say that the two distinct personalities of recycling — the mother earth aura that was embraced by Americans and the number-crunching alter ego that emerged later — are what really collided in New York in Mr. Bloomberg's budget address last month.
The question now is what happens next. Is recycling still a feel-good enterprise, or has Mr. Bloomberg lifted the curtain to reveal that behind all the imagery of higher purpose there was no Great Oz at all, but only a mousy accountant with an adding machine?
"I think people are sort of in shock," said the Bronx borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr. "Here we've been doing this public education campaign, talking about conserving water, reducing waste. We told people this is for the greater good, we passed laws requiring citizens to participate in protecting the environment, then suddenly we say we're going to give up because it doesn't quite balance the ledger."
Recycling has always been linked to the market economy: reuse means returning material to the manufacturing sector. Many pioneer recyclers remember the mountains of bottles and paper that piled up in the first recycling centers, before reuse markets had developed.
But the rough patch that recycling has hit in recent years is not just a matter of markets. New York City's sanitation commissioner, John J. Doherty, said in an interview that he saw a kind of wall in recycling, with each new percentage increase in the so-called diversion rate — how much is taken out of the garbage stream — becoming harder and more expensive to achieve.
Patterns of behavior have changed too. More and more beverages are drunk outside the home, in people's cars and in public places. Many containers — the water, sports drink and juice bottles that seem to be everywhere and that didn't exist a generation ago — are thrown out rather than be saved and put in a recycling bin.
Nationally, the container recycling rate peaked in the early to mid-1990's and has been drifting lower ever since.
But recycling's rhythms have been especially tied to the question of landfills, and waste industry experts say that a looming constriction of space — predicted in the 1970's but avoided in the 1980's with the vast expansion of landfills in states like Pennsylvania — may now ultimately prove to be recycling's best hope of a resurgence.
The ample availability of landfills, especially in the Northeast, kept garbage disposal prices cheap through the 1990's, even as labor prices involved in recycling went up. It really was becoming cheaper to throw things away, and so it appeared by the logic of the market perspective that recycling had failed.
But that availability is now over, and some researchers say that the Bloomberg administration may well have bet on the wrong horse. In the next decade, they say, the graph lines could cross once again and recycling, rejected now on the basis of market calculation, could well be rescued by the same logic as it becomes the cheaper alternative.
"There will be an increasing incentive to recycle," said James Thompson Jr., the president of Chartwell Information Publishers, a San Diego company that tracks the waste industry. "It will force communities and people to rethink the whole waste problem. The corner is turning right now, especially in the Northeast."
The turning of that corner is when the biggest psychological unknown of Mr. Bloomberg's recycling experiment could have its test. Could recycling be brought back? Would ingrained habits be lost? Perhaps most important, would people feel different about it?
"Before, you were helping the planet, etc.," said Raymond De Young, an associate professor of environmental psychology and conservation behavior at the University of Michigan. "But that argument may not carry as much weight as it did in the past, because of the way it was shut down. I can imagine people thinking that the city is being hypocritical, or that recycling is meaningless."
On the other hand, he said, the mayor might also have opened a door to a new kind of learning curve about recycling, that talking about the intricacies of the pulp and plastics markets could make it even more relevant to residents.
It might also raise the broader question of whether recycling really worked, not by the narrow measures of the market alone, but by the standards of what it set out to do: change the way Americans think. Environmentalists say that the psychological returns are mixed. Consumer packaging, after 30 years of supposed consciousness raising, is more profligate than ever. Twelve-mile-per-gallon Range Rovers prowl the streets.
"I'm not sure what the measure is of something working in our society," said Theodore Roszak, a professor of history at California State University at Hayward, whose book "The Voice of the Earth" (Simon & Schuster, 1992)., is considered one of the founding works of the field of eco- psychology, which examines the ways that people relate to the earth and its environment.
Dr. Roszak said that recycling may in the end be a small thing because it hasn't changed much or a big thing because of what it may yet achieve. No one can tell yet, he said.
"Certainly recycling is not enough, but there is nothing we would gain by giving up the recycling effort either," he said. "The one thing you can say is that it's something we have gotten in the habit of doing and it seems like a step forward from where we were."
This article is good because it is frank about the fact recycling was always a psychological exercise, and was never really about waste minimization. It was all about people feeling good about doing something for the environment. The fact that it was wasteful, stupid, and ultimately bad for the environment was always completely beside the point. Mayor Bloomburg is finally pointing out the obvious.
BTW, I would point out to the New York Times that the reason more people recycle than vote is because you are not subject to a $500 fine every time you fail to vote. Not yet, anyway.
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