So, yesterday I hauled all my empty bottles, cans, and newspapers off to the local recycling center. It took me three round trips on my bike and about two hours, so I was feeling quite virtuous and proud of myself. Until I got home and ran across this email in my inbox: Celebrate Zero Waste Day. According to these people, my valiant efforts may be part of the problem, not part of the solution.... According to the Zero Waste people, the whole idea of recycling is mainly a gimmick perpetrated by manufacturers of soda, beer, juice, and bottled water to get themselves off the hook for providing socially and environmentally responsible packaging and put the burden for dealing with the problem of waste on us consumers. Instead of cooperating with this plan, they say, we should demand that these manufactures go back to putting their products in returnable/reusable bottles, and boycott products that come in plastic and non-reusable bottles. Personally, I think this argument makes some good points. Recycling is a huge improvement over dumping all this junk into landfills, and we should all be responsible for cleaning up after ourselves. But recycling doesn’t do much to tackle the problems of excess waste and excessive use of non-biodegradable materials at the source of the problem: the manufacturing process. And there are other, proven ways of handling this problem that could accomplish this goal better, like the old reusable bottles with a refundable deposit that all soda and beer used to come in. But there are drawbacks, too. Prices for these products would probably go up, and it is more work for consumers to schlepp glass bottles around than plastic bottles. And there’s always the question of how effective or appropriate it is for government to legislate how people should handle “lifestyle” problems like this. Sometimes, getting told what to do just makes you feel like doing the opposite, out of spite. Maybe it’s better to put resources into educating people about how their consumption practices affect the environment, and leave it to them to force manufacturers to change with their personal buying decisions. Anyway, at the moment, I’m mostly feeling frustrated at how hard it is to “be responsible” in the kind of world we live in these days. I firmly believe that a big part of living a healthy lifestyle is being true to your own values, and my values do include doing what I can to maximize the good and minimize the harm I do to other people and creatures, and to the environment, through my own choices and habits as a consumer. But sometimes, it feels like the only way to do that is to become almost obsessive about scrutinizing the moral and ecological implications of every personal choice you make–mainly because big manufacturers, advertisers, retailers and the government don’t seem to be thinking about these things much at all. And then you have to put a large amount of your own time into dealing with waste products and other problems that wouldn’t exist if things were done a little differently on the other end of the producer-consumer chain. That doesn’t seem right to me. Or maybe I'm just feeling sorry for myself today? How do you feel about and handle these issues? Are you going to celebrate Zero Waste Day? |
More From SparkPeople
|
.png)
