Written by Jacob Kaiser
I have grown up in a home where we do our best to recycle whatever we can within the boundaries that our local recycling program allows us. This includes plastics of all kinds, cardboard, paper, and aluminum. Unfortunately, it became increasingly difficult to recycle when I left my house. If I went to a local fast food restaurant and was provided a plastic container that could be recycled, more often than not, the only option I was given for waste disposal was the landfill.
Of course, I guess I could have taken the container home with me to recycle. However, the issue is that most people, including myself, have thrown away recyclable items simply because it was more convenient to throw it in the garbage at the restaurant rather than taking it home to recycle it there. One of my favorite articles illustrating this is a satire from The Onion called “’How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?’ 30 Million People Wonder.” This article puts a funny, satirical spin on this convenience factor that many people, including myself, have fallen into.
In the 1990s, Wisconsin started enacting bans for certain materials in throughout the state. Items include plastics, aluminum, cardboard, office paper, and other common recyclables (for a full list, see http://dnr.wi.gov/org/aw/wm/recycle/banned.html). My particular focus for this will be on disposing plastics in public, since it seems to me that plastic containers are the most common recyclable item that are sold in a public place. The DNR reports that in 2009, the amount of plastic landfilled increased from 499,313 tons to 605,346 tons per year between 2002 and 2009. I see a pretty big inconsistency between plastic being banned in landfills, and the amount of plastic in landfills increasing.
Last year in my home community of Muskego, Wisconsin, I was excited to learn that the local recycling program had joined a growing list of communities that have expanded their list of recyclable items to include plastics #1-7, instead of the conventional #1 and #2 plastic bottles. This should also have allowed for public places that use disposable plastic containers in their facility to now recycle them. However, at least in my community, I have not seen any new options made for recycling in public and, based on the DNR’s findings, the amount of plastic disposed of has still increased. Based on this information, I believe that we need more collaboration between the recycling facilities and the communities that fall under this category to help reduce the amount of plastic that is thrown away simply out of inconvenience. If we can accomplish that in these communities, more “uncommonly recycled plastics” (plastics #3-7) will enter the market and hopefully create new incentives for other communities to adopt similar programs to include these plastics and significantly reduce the amount of plastic that will spend hundreds of years in a landfill.
The DNR’s report shows the overall amount of landfilled waste decreasing. The only recyclable exception to this is plastic, which I believe stems out of increased use of disposable plastics in public areas and a lack of recycling containers for people to throw them in. By increasing the convenience to recycle these plastics by working with companies to include more recycling bins, the amount of plastic being landfilled will decrease, which will help Wisconsin enforce it’s own law on plastic being banned in landfills, and ultimately, improve the quality of the environment through less pollution, including greenhouse gas reductions, and less unnecessary waste going to an unproductive location.
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