waste and recyling (by alex)

(posted on behalf of alex)

Being a part of the recycling group, I paid special attention to the Disposal section. Everyone else has talked a lot about the book so I have decided to share a little story with you that relates to the book. I hope you enjoy:

I was having a nice Socratic dialogue with one of my friends a few weeks ago about recycling and how horrible Oxy’s program is. He shared the frustration with me but admitted that he neither recycled nor put his garbage in the bins. He simply leaves it out. My immediate reaction was, naturally, “wow, you’re a bad person” (I’m keeping this PG). But when he explained to me his reasoning, I found it to be very profound and interesting. He doesn’t recycle or throw away his trash because proper placement of discarded items is not the issue. For the most part (that is, excluding hippies like us), people have disposal services for sanitation and to preserve order. If we did not have these services, people would just throw trash on the street and we would have cities flooded with garbage (if you don’t believe me, read about the Five Points neighborhood in the early 19th century). We can agree, then, that these services are a good because we maintain (for the most part) clean, healthy, and orderly environments. The consequence of this, however, is that we simply put our trash in a bin and then it becomes someone else’s problem and no longer our responsibility. By hiding our trash in a bin, it gets taken to the landfill which is the area we have designated to pollute instead of our home. Leonard talks about the host of environmental problems there, including toxics seeping into the groundwater, the excess of methane gas, and the use of incinerators. But these are for the most part inconsequential for us. Once we put them in the bin they are out of sight, out of mind. Back to my friend, he pollutes the campus to counter this, to put the consequences of trash “in sight and in mind”. He sees his actions as a form of culture jamming, whereby someone sees the trash and so is forced, even if only for a second, to consider pollution and how trash is affecting their life.

Is he justified in doing this? You tell me. If only one person is doing it then it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. But I think this story does force you to ask some questions about the production system as a whole that Leonard outlines in her book. Particularly, it asks us to reshape our perception of personal environmental responsibility. I hope this picks at your brain a little bit, and I hope that maybe we can one day figure out a way to solve this problem.