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Lindsay Hall
Professor Elise Glaum
UNIV 111
November 4th, 2014
The Cycle in Recycle
As I began watching the environmental documentary Bag It, my ears filled with oddly
upbeat music and the voice of your average man—no Morgan Freeman-type tone—who had
decided to look into the world’s obsession with plastic. Shopping bags caught in tree limbs,
water bottles littering the streets, and plastic packaging floating in the ocean dominated the
screen in front of me. It’s alarming how accustomed I have come to these images. Yes, of course
they are still frightening, but I see that sort of thing everyday walking around outside—actually
even inside.
Just under my desk in my dorm is a plastic bag filled with plastic bags that are just sitting
there. I’ve accumulated them over the past few months with trips to Kroger and Rite Aid and the
various food choices on campus that insist on giving a complementary plastic bag with every
meal. It has all become commonplace. What harm could they be, really? They have that familiar
chasing arrow on them to indicate that they’re recyclable, so what’s so bad? My mind thought
back to the trash room in GRC. The metal door opens to a room flooded with dim, yellow light
in which two metal dumpsters reside. One is for trash and the other is designated for recyclables.
It’s simple to tell which is which due to the superfluous amount of stickers indicating what you
can and cannot put inside of it. There are three separate stickers that state specifically that you
cannot put plastic bags in the recycling bin. How can that be? How can plastic bags not be put in
the same recycling as plastic packaging? Hell—how can plastic bags not be put in the same
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recycling with every other recyclable out there—glass, plastic, paper, and cardboard? My
ignorance hit me. How is that type of recycling even possible? What happened to separating
papers from plastics? The ultimate question eating at me was something I felt I should already
know the answer to: How does single-stream recycling work after it leaves our curbsides?
As the documentary played on, it continually pushed the naivety of society, and I
watched with fists clenched around my pillow, finding it hard to come to terms with. For
something that is clearly such a large part of everyday life, it is crazy that a great deal of the
population is clueless to the lifecycle of recyclables once they are out of their sight. I find it
difficult to understand how we continue to function as such a clueless society.
Of course, the type of recycling you have is all dependent on what area you live in. Some
areas isolate their recycling with paper, plastics, and glass. Other areas simply throw all of the
recyclables into one bin and call it a day. Once that recycling bin leaves the curb, we forget about
those bottles and boxes and carry on with our lives, continuing to obtain and dispose of what
seems like an endless supply of plastic. Just because people might be guilty of not knowing the
whole recycling process does not necessarily mean they do not care, but rather they are just
uninformed and undereducated on the process.
According to Sarah Laskow, a writer for the Atlantic with a Bachelors degree in
Literature from Yale University, the system of single-stream recycling first emerged in 1990s
California, and it has only grown from there. This simpler process arose for two main reasons: 1)
it is less of a hassle so more people tend to participate, and 2) it is only one pile for the collection
truck to deal with which saves cities money (Laskow). The real action takes place once it reaches
the material recovery facility, or MRF for short. These buildings act as the middlemen between
recycling collection and the markets that use the materials to make new products. The MRFs that
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deal with single-stream recycling are referred to as “dirty” material recovery facilities due to the
high level of work it takes to sort out the different objects. Salman Zafar, a celebrated expert in
the fields of waste management and sustainability with a Masters degree in Chemical
Engineering, states that these facilities use a combination of machinery, such as magnets, and
manpower to complete the laborious separating of materials (Zafar). Due to the high-level of
effort required to run such facilities, the process of single-stream recycling actually ends up
being “more expensive than sorting things before they got to the dump” (Laskow). Essentially,
the process was created to make things simpler and cheaper, but in reality it’s been making
things more complicated and costly.
Another problem that dirty MRFs face is the risk of cross-contamination between
materials. The material that tends to be the biggest hassle is the glass. Through all the sorting,
dumping, and crushing, the glass ends up broken and shattered and ultimately compromises the
integrity of the other bales. Since it is sometimes difficult to ensure that the bales are purely one
material, many recyclables end up in landfills as if the items had just been thrown out in the first
place (Laskow). Items that end up in landfills pile up to essentially be mummified, and although
they are carefully engineered, “they can leak liquids into the ground water” (Krusinski). So while
many people intend to do good by recycling, it’s actually extremely complicated and isn’t a
flawless method.
MRFs have definite upsides too though. Many materials are recycled on again, like glass
and aluminum, and some materials are put to use as fuel source to produce energy (Zafar).
According to Dan Kulpinski, who has a Masters degree in Environmental Sciences and Policy,
explains that the items that are recycled into new goods, an enormous amount of energy is saved.
For example, to create an aluminum can from recycled materials “takes 95 percent less
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energy…than from virgin bauxite ore” (Kulpinski). The recyclables that do end up being
processed and reused make a huge difference to the overall materials consumed and energy used
to salvage raw resources.
Overall, single-stream recycling is a convenience. Sorting out paper from plastic from
glass seems like such a trivial thing to be annoyed about, but we would rather throw it all in one
bin and leave it for someone else to figure out. We are so accustomed to convenience. That’s
why plastic is so great to begin with—it’s disposable. Why bother doing the dishes when you can
just throw them away? Or, recycle them rather. Recycling is the crutch that people use to fall
back on to justify why their plastic consumption is acceptable, but the whole process just “lulls
people into thinking they are making a difference” (Bag It).
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Works Cited
Bag It. Dir. Suzan Beraza. Narr. Jeb Berrier. Reel Thing, 2010. Film.
Kulpinski, Dan. “Human Footprint: Where Does All the Stuff Go?” National Geographic.
National Geographic Society, 2014. Web. 1 Nov. 2014.
Laskow, Sarah. “Single-Stream Recycling Is Easier for Consumers, but Is It Better?”
theatlantic.com. The Atlantic Monthly Group, 18 Sept. 2014. Web. 26 Oct. 2014.
Zafar, Salman. “Introduction to MRF.” EcoMENA. EcoMENA, 18 Feb. 2013. Web. 27 Oct.
2014.
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