Over the past several weeks, I had been accumulating plastics that aren't collected by my town's recycling program — mostly yogurt cartons, deli takeout containers and produce packages — based on the word that Eastside Food Coop was doing a pilot program to recycle those oddball bits of #1-6 plastics. Thursdays and Fridays are the collection days, so today I took my saddlebag full of plastic up to Central Avenue, just north of Lowry.
Urbanist William McDonough isn't impressed. He calls this downcycling, and writes about the costs and unintended consequences of turning materials into inferior products that will be incinerated or landfilled anyway.
Just because a material is recycled does not automatically make it ecologically benign, especially if it was not designed specifically for recycling. Blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects can be no better — and perhaps even worse — than doing nothing.
Viewed from a systems perspective, McDonough's critique is legitimate. It also justifies inaction for folks who prefer to do nothing anyway. But packing my plastic, along with hundreds of others who do the same, puts some information into the system.
The truck that came to haul away the plastic was leaving ahead of schedule because it was overflowing. People were making the effort to bring these useless materials to this obscure spot in a non-hip neighborhood, just as we once drove our bottles and cans to the Twin Cities' only recycling station back in the '70s.
Indeed, a woman drove up shortly after I arrived and made sure her bag got on the departing truck. Thanks to her insistence, I got my larger load included as well. Driving a small bag of plastics to the coop is easily lampooned, and a better approach would've been to plan the drop as part of a necessary trip, to save more plastic first, collect the neighborhood's waste or enjoy a bike ride with a light load.
Oh, well. Not all small steps get you anywhere, but they are necessary precursors to giant leaps.
