Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

Recycling, once practiced intensely, was no longer an option, forcing governments and business alike to seek alternatives. Those alternatives, in retrospect, seem absurd: when a massive earthquake struck Anchorage, Alaska, in 1964, destroying thousands of cars, residents disposed of them by dropping the vehicles off a 350-foot cliff; local Florida governments, overwhelmed by the hulks, started dumping them in the ocean out of a misplaced hope that they might form reefs.

The January 2013 issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology contained the results of two experiments that should concern anyone who embraces recycling as a means to preserve natural resources and promote a sustainable lifestyle. In the first, researchers asked study participants to evaluate a new product—in this case, scissors—by cutting up paper in various, preordained configurations. Half of the study participants did the evaluation in the presence of a trash bin, only, and half did it in the presence of a trash bin and a recycling bin. The results were troubling: those who performed the task in the presence of a recycling bin used twice as much paper as those who could only throw their excess paper in a trash bin. “This suggests that the addition of a recycling option can lead to increased resource usage,” wrote the authors, Jesse Catlin and Yitong Wang.

between 1960 and 2010, the volume of recyclables that Americans harvested from their homes rose from 5.6 million to 65 million tons. That sounds pretty good until you realize that during the same period the amount of trash generated by those same Americans rose from 81.1 million to 249.9 million tons.

The best way to achieve that latter goal is to educate consumers that recycling isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for their consumption.

my second answer to the question of how we can boost recycling rates is this: Demand that companies start designing products for repair, reuse, and recycling.

Take, for example, the super-thin MacBook Air, a wonder of modern design packed into an aluminum case that’s barely bigger than a handful of documents in a manila envelope. At first glance, it would seem to be a sustainable wonder that uses fewer raw materials to do more. But that’s just the gloss; the reality is that the MacBook Air’s thin profile means that its components—memory chips, solid state drive, and processor—are packed so tightly in the case that there’s no room for upgrades (a point driven home by the unusual screws used to hold the case together, thus making home repair even more difficult). Even worse, from the perspective of recycling, the thin profile (and the tightly packed innards) means that the computer is exceptionally difficult to break down into individual components when it comes time to recycle it. In effect, the MacBook Air is a machine built to be shredded, not repaired, upgraded, and reused.

Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn’t mean you’ve recycled anything, and it doesn’t make you a better, greener person: it just means you’ve outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it’s overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter. Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there’s always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place.