Trashing Recycling

Evidence has been building for years that recycling programs are inefficient and not cost effective. It’s reached a head now, with many cities suspending their curbside recycling programs. In fact, many have already been sending the recyclables they’ve been collecting to the landfill. You can read what may be surprising details here, here, and here.

But this blog is about communication, so I will focus on that aspect. We have long been encouraged, indoctrinated, even badgered, to recycle. Municipalities have gone to great lengths to make recycling part of everyone’s daily and weekly regimen, providing special carts, placing receptacles in public places, and educating the public on both the importance and the process of recycling.

Last summer, I was at a city-wide Fourth of July celebration held in a park in a nearby suburb. Temporary trash and recycling receptacles were everywhere, set up to clear the detritus from dozens of picnics. As I kept an eye on the receptacles, I was bemused by the number of people who dutifully approached the multiple containers (marked “Landfill,” “Plastic,” “Paper,” “Compost,” and “Cans”) and stood there in option paralysis. They might still be standing there if it hadn’t been for the “Recycling Nazis.”

These helpful folks, dressed in brightly-colored recycling - but not recycled - T-shirts, instructed the befuddled on the right - and terribly wrong - choices that faced them. They were quite single-minded - even zealous - about their duties. More than once, I saw them burrowing into the containers to correct a wrongly-placed plate or plastic utensil - having been too late to catch the actual perpetrator.

Let’s face it: all of the recycling education and indoctrination has failed. The public is confused, the cities are abandoning their recycling programs, and the researchers are nearing surrender. I can easily imagine someone leaving a protest to save the earth and tossing their coffee cup out of the car during the drive home. As always, common sense is the best guide for how to proceed. I was a Boy Scout (I guess I still am), and we learned to respect nature, to not litter, and to leaving a place in better condition than when we found it. Instead of beating a dead horse about recycling, we simply need to be exhorted to clean up after ourselves.

Is It Really "All About Me"?

For a very long time, I have corrected my children (now all adults) when they put themselves first in a list of people, as in “Me, Bob, and Susie.” It was drilled into me through decades of English classes that we always put ourselves last in such cases. “Bob, Susie, and me!” I would insist. It does feel like a losing battle, though. And when you look at our culture you can see why: this “error” is part of the vernacular.

I’m going to engage is some very amateur psychology – or sociology, or even theology - here, so feel free to take my proposition with a grain of salt. We can point to the failed “self-esteem” efforts in schools that resulted in participation trophies and contributed to poor grades. I suggest that the focus in our society on self and selfishness has infiltrated our language, and I would argue that much of this is due to our abandonment of God. Yes, God. The bible speaks clearly on this subject:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”

-          Philippians 2:3-4

Does this not go against everything we hear today – in conversation, on social media, on television? I swear that every other commercial I see says they have something I “deserve.” (I guess advertising has never really changed, has it?)

I think the world would be a better place – and pretty quickly, too – if we just followed the admonition to put others before ourselves. Maybe forcing ourselves to say “Bob, Susie and me” would remind us.