Greenwashing

There is a recycling crisis that our governments have not found a way to manage.  The production of plastics has grown from almost zero in the 1950s to 350 million tons in 2018. Since China banned imports of plastic recycling in 2018, there is nowhere for the 100 million tons of waste to go.

When the recycling boom first started there were boxes everywhere encouraging citizens to recycle newspapers, bottles, and plastic.  It was our duty to help save the planet.  After a few years, when more newsprint was collected than could be processed profitably, the boxes disappeared. Every household once had a thick telephone book that could be recycled, but when the local charity organizations who did the footwork of collecting the books learned they had earned nothing, they stopped doing it. Luckily a few years later, the internet made phone books obsolete.  When too much of the glass recycling was contaminated, the glass bins disappeared as well.  There were innumerable government programs and PSA’s about recycling, because “That’s what we do.”  After a few years, news came back from China and the far east,  that they didn’t want our trash any more.  There were red faces and containers were sent back to North America but waste companies who are willing to risk getting caught continue trade.  As long as there are profits to be made and the troublesome stuff disappears, nobody wants to dig too deep. 

The recycling sham continues with government encouragement and very little to back up the fact that any significant volume of recycling is taking place. The government says that 97% of Canadian households use at least one recycling program, which makes it sound like 97% of rubbish is recycled.  Statistics suggest that less than only 10% of discarded plastic is recycled. A recent consumer test asked three companies to recycle identical bales of plastic.  One incinerated the plastic, one took it to the landfill, and one recycled it into pellets.  The waste from incinerating any plastics has to be buried in landfills because it is toxic.  Most plastic can only be recycled once.

We rely on package delivery more than ever.  For reasons of health and safety, many more people stay home in their cocoons. Digital media has killed the daily newspaper delivery to the door, people rarely send letters in the post, bills are sent and paid electronically, so the only person who comes knocking is the delivery man.  He is not the one who takes away the packaging or the old item that is being replaced.  Running alongside this boom in online purchases is a supply chain that keeps the digital hardware operational.  Computer hard drives, monitors, keyboards, POS systems, and communication equipment, all need replacing when they wear out or become outdated.  Most businesses have a minimum of a printer and/or a photocopier.  An industry of logistical games has sprung up around deliveries and returns.  To atone for polluting the environment with used electronics and plastic toner cartridges, a system of return waybills has been created to send the replacement parts back to their distributors.  When these materials are returned, they are sorted, re-used if possible, and the rest find their way to landfills. The delivery companies appear to be towing the line, to cover their backs, but in truth there is a profitable side-business in tracking these returned items.  This uses both human and mechanical resources, the cost of which is borne by the shipper, as an environmental tax.  Given that most of these items are smaller than a loaf of bread, all of the packing, shipping, pickup, and delivery is a losing financial proposition.  But the companies involved, pat themselves on the back, and tell us that they are helping save the planet, when really their clever plan to squeeze more money out of the consumer, while waving a blue flag, only compounds the problem.  It is probably better to send a toner cartridge to a local landfill than to send it halfway across the world, only to have it end up in a foreign landfill.

Big businesses like soft drink companies imply that their bottles will be transformed and reshaped into useful things.  It is a romantic idea but that is not the case.  A recent study by Environment Canada suggested that more than 90% of plastics end up in landfills.  Recycling companies will not recycle anything unless there is a profit to be made.  Canadians throw away 3 metric tons of plastic waste a year, and 2.8 metric tons end up in landfill.  I live in a city which has had a single-use plastic ban for several years.  There are no plastic bags available in supermarkets, only paper which are awkward and don’t stand up to weather.  I used to recycle my grocery bags as rubbish bags, but now I have to buy rubbish bags that also end up in the landfill.  This is illogical, unless the companies who manufacture rubbish bags have cleverly lobbied the green faction into a policy that helps their profits. 

The supermarket where I shop makes extravagant use of plastic clamshell packaging for pastries and vegetables.  Where fruit and vegetables are not prepackaged, there are rolls of free plastic bags to contain them, but at a checkout plastic bags are forbidden.  There is an option at the checkout to buy a heavy-duty reusable shopping bag with the supermarket logo for a high price. We are free to consume that particular plastic if we pay.  This is deceitful, like the current practice of selling packages at the same price as before, but reducing the amount in the package.

Although landfills have been used extensively in North America since it was settled, it has never been an ideal way to dispose of trash.  Out of sight out of mind does not mean the danger has gone away.  For many years people dumped things including rubbish into the sea, believing that it would magically disappear into nature’s great washing machine, but as time goes on we have discovered that dumping nuclear waste into an ocean doesn’t make it disappear. 

Landfills can leach into waterways if they are not properly situated, and some elements end up in the water table no matter where they are buried.  There is a large supermarket in my hometown built over a landfill that for 30 years was the city dump. Anything and everything went in there until the gulley filled up and the city opened a more massive fill on the clay banks above the river.  None of the shoppers or employees in the supermarket know they are working over a brew of toxins, and nobody publicizes the fact because it would be bad for business.  Most regular shoppers know that the underground parking stinks but they don’t know why.

Where are organizations set up under the umbrella of NGOs who deem themselves the ones to bestow eco-friendly ratings on businesses who want to crow to their clients about how green they are.  The application to participate can run to several pages with detailed questions about heating, cooling, power use, and waste management.  It is easy to exaggerate the truth to nudge statistics to the positive side.  Does the business have a geo-exchange system?  Most managers don’t know if they have or not, but imagine if they  say yes, if it will land them a better rating.  Three green keys instead of two.  The ratings company rarely does inspections, but if a business does get caught out in its lies and the green organization rescinds its rating, another eco-talking greenwasher would be happy to put his sticker of approval on a window.  The general public don’t know the difference, the business owner will be happy as he appears to be doing his part, and the government boasts about statistics they have had no hand in measuring. And so, the pleasant illusion of environmental righteousness continues. 

A third of our waste comes from households, while two thirds comes from industrial, commercial, and institutional sources.  Regulations, like single use plastics in shops, concentrate on private citizens because individuals are easier to convince than corporations. Our mountains of garbage have only been around for a short while.  My grandparents retired to a lake in the 1950’s, and made only a weekly trip to the dump for the few small bags of real rubbish they could not use.  Much of this was tins that had been flattened so animals wouldn’t get stuck in them, but all excess paper was used at home to start fires to cook meals, glass bottles and jars were re-used, and organic scraps went onto a compost pile.  Plastic barely existed so we had nothing to throw away.  Yet plastic, which we are so bad at recycling, and which has a shelf life of usefulness in our environment, comes from petroleum, which is in limited supply.  We generate so much rubbish that our grandparents would be astounded at the waste.  Along with the arrival of plastics, came its marketing tag word of ‘disposable’, which sounds convenient but is a lie.  Before Einstein’s words on energy, Lavoisier in 1789 discovered that matter cannot be created or destroyed, only change its state and form.  Ignoring that, we are busy extracting minerals from the earth and spreading them in microbeads all over our planet.   The age of plastics might go down in history like the age of dinosaurs, which did not end well.

From the beginning, humans recognized there were environmental problems to be solved.  It didn’t take long to learn that throwing scraps outside the family cave would attract the wrong kind of attention. In the 20th century, the penicillin century, when more people lived longer, so many new materials, including nuclear options, were developed with little regard to their afterlife.  In the early 1960’s when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she was standing on the shoulders of others, but even with this foreknowledge, the speed with which the earth continues to be buried under garbage and toxic waste is astounding.   The best response our society can come up with is greenwashing, which encourages lip service and pouring money into policies that demonstrably don’t work.  We fiddle with regulations while Rome burns. 

The solutions to these problems don’t rest with individuals or governments as they are onlookers to the multinational business engines that drive the world’s economies.  These global companies have the skills and intelligence not only to fix the recycling crisis, but to take innovative steps toward getting us back to the uncontaminated garden we humans once enjoyed as our home. Instead they choose to exploit everyone and everything as they have always done, and to parrot the greenwashing lies because real solutions generate less profit.