I honestly can't imagine the way things would be without
recycling. The city I grew up in has one of
the oldest municipal recycling services in the country and so I've been
surrounded by the ideas of recycling for my whole life. It's been a
real culture shock for me to go to from a setting like that to a rural,
blue collar town where municipal services aren't provided or even
practical.
My dorm has a single computer lab with two printers. As you can
imagine, sharing something with 500 of your closest friends usually
ends up with stuff not working like it should. The printers exact
karmic retribution on any student trying to run off a paper ten
minutes before it is due by tricking them. They make all the sounds a
printer should make; the whining of the capacitors charging, the drone
of the rollers, and the steady scrape of paper running through the
internal components. But HA!, instead of printing off
the latest of a long list of plot analyses of All Quiet on the Western
Front you're left with a sheet of paper covered sporadically with
symbolic gibberish! Not to mention the fact that when this happens
people order it to print again so many times it completely fills the
buffer.
This means that the lab goes through reams of paper each week, most
of which have only one or two lines of printing on them. All of these
papers migrate to the trash over time, wasting huge amounts of paper
that's only barely used. Buckminster Fuller once said "Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting.
We
allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."
What he meant was that everything has use; that humanity has already
taken out of the earth all the resources we will ever need for
civilization. The failure is in the recovery of those resources for
useful purposes. To wit, each ton of paper requires 7000 gallons of
water or about half a cup per sheet. A single tree makes about 12000
sheets of paper meaning that about 6000 sheets of paper end up in the
landfill, decomposing to produce methane and CO2,
two significant greenhouse gasses. In addition, the
production of paper is uses the third most fossil fuels and the most
water of any industry to finish a product. All of this, while not
offset by recycling, can be sharply reduced by the simple act of
putting paper into one bin instead of the other.
So, today I tried an experiment; I conspicuously placed a packing
box from my room in the computer lab and labeled it for recycling.
Though there are recycling bins just outside the doors of the dorm, few
people care enough to go out there to recycle something when they can
simply throw it away right where they are. The key to making recycling
effective is to make it a culture and to make it just as accessible as
putting something in the trash; to bring recycling to the people
instead of expect the people to go to the recycling. So today I put a
packing box that was sitting in my closet on top of the printers in the
lab and labeled it for paper recycling. It may not make a large
difference but even small changes add up over time to become something
substantial.