I was thinking about this yesterday in the context of recycling. A friend just moved to Atlanta, and I was helping his partner move them into his new condo. We were generating a lot of cardboard (oh, Ikea, for all your grandstanding and fairly hypocritical claims of environmental responsibility, you really suck. Really bad. Here's a hint as to how to be more environmentally friendly: quit selling so much fucking crap with a built-in product life of a year or two. Quit selling junk food on paper and plastic plates, with plastic flatware, and a side of paper cup. Your in-store recycling is lovely, but how about more reduction so less recycling is necessary? How about you quit passing on the financial savings of flat-packing to the ecologies and communities which are impacted by the immense amounts of cardboard, styrofoam, and plastic your flat packing demands?
On a related note of Ikea sucking, check out this article in the Economist laying bare the revolting faux-charity corporate structure of the cheap furniture powerhouse:
What emerges is an outfit that ingeniously exploits the quirks of different jurisdictions to create a charity, dedicated to a somewhat banal cause, that is not only the world's richest foundation, but is at the moment also one of its least generous. The overall set-up of IKEA minimises tax and disclosure, handsomely rewards the founding Kamprad family and makes IKEA immune to a takeover.But I digress: back to recycling. So, we have a lot of cardboard, in a high-rise condo in Atlanta. I wander down and ask the concierge/security guy where the building's recycling is, and get the somewhat obscure directions (it involves taking the elevator to a parking level, going through one set of doors, walking across the parking lot, then going through another set of doors, then finding the big mixed recycling bin in a moderately smelly and very humid loading dock.
My quest to find the recycling area is aided by several signs that say IN LARGE LETTERS THAT ABSOLUTELY NO GLASS CAN BE RECYCLED. Oh, and mandating that NO CARDBOARD CAN BE LEFT BY THE RECYCLING AREA. But there's another direction indicating that there is a special area for cardboard recycling at the back of the loading dock. Right on! Recycling obsessivist that I am, I don't mind walking a little farther to the special cardboard recycling area. What I do mind is that when I get there, it turns out the extra super special area for cardboard recycling is a HUGE DUMPSTER FULL OF ASSORTED GARBAGE. Booooooooo!
I left our friend a note on how to get to his recycling, and that he can recycle both his cardboard and glass at our building. I have faith in this particular friend that he actually cares enough to go to this extra trouble, and also to consider the issue in his purchasing.
But c'mon: do we really have to make recycling this difficult? Do we really have to contract it out to greedy private corporations who only care about making a profit on it? Isn't the value of keeping the material out of toxic landfills that destroy communities and water tables sufficient to have municipal recycling, even on relatively low energy return material like glass?
Let's remember, this is a waste hirearchy for a reason: think about this the next time you buy bottled water, a genuine and ongoing ecological catastrophe that even McNewspaper finds a problem:
Plastic water bottles produced for U.S. consumption take 1.5 million barrels of oil per year... That much energy could power 250,000 homes or fuel 100,000 cars for a year...
Even if we can do a good job of separating and recycling water bottles, it still comes down to the fact that it's completely unnecessary... Strictly speaking, tap water isn't free — it costs about $0.00002 per ounce. But single-serve bottled water costs between 1,000 and 4,000 times more...
No comments:
Post a Comment