This Could Be a Mistake
There’s always work. At night, reading stories with my kids: there is work in some percentage of my conscious mind. Talking to my wife in the quiet of the 60 minutes of post kid-bed-time-quiet-exhaustion… even THEN … work sits in a small part of my brain. And it itches.
So it is today. I volunteered to take my 2 daughters – and their small class – on a “nature field trip”. They go every Thursday and it typically consists of a visit to the beach, collecting shells. Or maybe to the yarn shop to make some kind of cutesy … cute thing. It’s nice, fun. Cute.
I decide to take them to the dump.
It fascinates me and always has. The psychology of throwing shit away is an intense stew of denial, absurdity and ego-fantastical bullshit. I thought so before and I’m convinced of it now – but kids… they don’t have the weird shit we have. They like Big Machines, crunching stuff, and raw materials from which to build forts and Fairy Battlegrounds.
Enough pretending this world is a ball of yarn and pretty seashells. Today is Junk Art, Crashing Trash from Booming Trucks, Exhaust, Mayhem, Smells and the 21st century Snake Oil otherwise known as “Recycling”.
“Hey Rob – sounds like an … interesting trip today…” offers one of the dads and he gives me that look. If you’re a dad – you know that look from one of your dad buddies when he drops his kid at your house.
Whatever work I was thinking of vanishes as the kids rush me. Their eyes are wide, smiles large, hair all over the place. Little bony wild bodies run up to me full of voice and intensity THE DUMP UNCLE ROB YAH!!!
Mom smiles that smile that says Whatever Just Don’t Kill Them Retard smile and drives away.
Oh shit.
Uncle Cholo
Yep, that’s his name. It’s tatoo’d on his neck. He wears a bright orange hard hat which shouts against his deep blue eyes. His pidgin is thick as the kids in the class watch him fire the giant piston at the transfer station, crushing the trash into the bin waiting just out of site. He’s Uncle Cholo and he runs the dump.
“You see dat der… some bugga throw away da bottle – you can recycle em now wid da HI-5 but off to da landfill bumbye…”
Uncle is showing them a bag of trash with some stray bottles left in. He’s excited – I don’t think he gets visitors much. 3 of the kids are watching a mattress explode under the unrelenting squeeze of the 5 foot by 5 foot piston, box springs cracking under the splintered wood frame.
“But… that’s a perfectly good bed!” yells one of the kids. “Why would anyone throw it away!”.
“We don’t ask em sistah – we stick on da truck and shoots! Off to da landfill in Kekaha”
Uncle sees trash all day long. People drop in, leave him their garbage, smile and wave, and then leave. Uncle sees what we leave behind every day. Uncle knows us better than we could ever imagine.
“Do you find cool stuff!” one of the younger girls asks.
“Oh yeah- you know what we find most of all? Money.”
“COOL! How MUCH!”
“Oh mostly da quartah… just a minute I swept a dime into da chute. Jeez if I save em I’d be one millionaire alreddy”
Money. We throw away money. For some reason I’m not surprised.
You’re All Trash
Before we start talking to Uncle, I pull the kids aside and tell them how we need to be safe here – there’s broken glass, broken… everything and it can cut us, make us sick. This place is really dirty, the things we don’t want come here.
So, today we’re all pieces of trash. You guys are garbage. What kind do you want to be? Everyone gets to pick what bit of trash they want to be for today and we’re going to find out why you’re here, and what’s going to happen to you.
“I’m a glass bottle!” shouts a young boy. “I’m an aluminum CAN!!!” “ME TOO!”.
In the end I have 3 cans, 2 bottles, 2 cardboard boxes and a plastic bottle. I’m the plastic bottle in case you’re wondering – someone has to be. No one in their right mind would pick a plastic bottle – it’s just not cool. Which is kind of interesting…
“Why are you here? Why, Mr. Aluminum Can, are you at the garbage dump?”
“Because someone used me up and they’re done and now I get to be RECYCLED!!!!”
“How many times were you used?” I ask.
“Ummm… one time? Yeah.. one time”.
Around the circle I ask each one how many times they were used. The kids that picked cardboard boxes tell me that they used to also function as kitty homes so they were used 3 times.
“Let’s go see what happens to you”.
Trucks.
We make our way over to the Aluminum bins, and we lift each kid up so they can see their new friends. Same with Cardboard and Glass. Some have lots of friends (there are a load of bottles – not so many cans) and the cardboard bin is completely filled.
“What happens to you now?” I ask.
“I dunno – we’re recycled right?”. Right – you’re “recycled”. I think back on my days as a Geologist working in the booming environmental field. I’d go to landfills routinely to take all kinds of measurements, to oil companies to test the effluent from their fractionation processing.
Curious thing with the environment: people very seldom wish to see what’s actually happening. They’d rather just know that “someone is doing something about it”. Case in point: the Chevron Refinery at Richmond, CA. They dump effluent into the SF Bay from various contamination points at their refinery.
At the time, citizens were pretty upset about the contaminants being spilled into the nearby wetlands habitat (rightly so). The local government said “make it safer” and by “safer” they meant “less parts per million of bad stuff”. So Chevron made a bigger pipe, pumped more water, and evacuated the same amount of effluent.
All with less parts per million of bad stuff. The citizens were happy. They just forked out millions of their tax dollars to help Chevron do absolutely nothing about a problem that the citizens themselves caused, with their SUVs.
“Recyclying – what does that mean to you?” I ask…
Ships.
Ask anyone who recycles why they do it, and they answer the same thing: “we should reuse this stuff and not put it in a landfill”. The same could be said of confiscated Crack Cocaine.
I’m feeling a bit of that surly edge kick in. The smoldering disillusionment of working in, what I felt, was an industry trying to do “good” – instead to find out we worked for the polluters, trying to get them by and let the keep polluting.
“It means we make new stuff from the things we recycle. Bottles are made into bottles again. Cans and cardboard too!”.
“Close” I say. “Aluminum cans are the one case where we reuse them completely. We melt them down and turn them into cans again – usually within 60 days. So you aluminum cans? You guys will be back in my house in 2 months. And then back here again…”
“The cardboard – not so much. Same with bottles and plastics. Let’s ask Uncle what happens to those.”
We wak over to Uncle Cholo who’s sitting in a chair, enjoying the day and the kids. We gather round him and his eyes perk up – a smile that one dad can see in another dad: I don’t even need to ask.
“Uncle – where does our recycling go?”
“Well – my daughta asked me jus dis da uddah day. You see da big green bin? All a dem – we fill em up and take em to da harbor in Lihue (an hour away). Den, stick em on a beeeg ship and off dey go to da mainland. From there… who knows?”
There are a number of big recycling facilities throughout the US. I recall seeing a huge scrap metal center outside of the San Francisco Bay Area where cars, refrigerators and other huge metal machines are reduced to little balls of metal and rubber. Their fluids carefully drained and shipped somewhere else.
Our plastics are milled down and put on big ships to China where they are used in manufacturing more crap for the West. Bottles are sent off to concrete facilities and used in pavement and, rarely, as glass in something else.
That bottle of water you bought the other day? The plastic was formulated at a chemical company in Ohio (most likely) and then sent to a bottle manufacturer – perhaps in Nevada. Once completed, the bottle is then sent off to be filled with “product” (usually water, which falls from the sky) – this can be anywhere in the world.
Once filled with water that bottle was then put on a series of trains and trucks until it reached a distribution hub, at which point it was put on a smaller truck and delivered to the place that you bought it from.
You drank it and, likely, spent all of 10 minutes enjoying it. Being a good person you decided to recycle this bottle and put it in the blue bin at your office.
This bin was dropped into another bin which was dropped into a truck which drove to a collection hub and the bottle was placed onto another truck or train and sent to California where it was dropped off and shredded into very small pieces. These pieces were put back on a truck and sent to San Pedro (the LA Harbor) and put on a ship which sailed halfway around the world to China, where the plastic was sold in bulk to a massive factory with questionable working conditions that makes cheap crap for our kids to play with.
“Wow on a SHIP? That must be a BIG SHIP!”
Yes, indeed, it’s a big ship.
But That Doesn’t Make Any Sense
I’m still tired from the nights before. I stayed up very late to be sure I knew at least a few answers to what the kids were going to ask. I already knew more than I wanted to based on my previous career – but I owe it to them to know more.
Landfills are filling up quickly – there are just too many people on the planet. These kids with me – we’re talking about recycling right now but what they don’t know is that our state, Hawaii, was about to send it’s trash to a landfill in Oregon.
Yes – all of our trash, put on a ship, and sailed across the ocean and up the Columbia Gorge.
“But that doesn’t make any sense at all!” says one of the kids. “Why would you put empty, used up bottles on a boat and send them across the sea?”
“I don’t know – maybe it’s cheaper than making the plastic in da first place?” says Uncle.
Actually, it’s not. It’s a whole lot more expensive to recycle just about… well everything. Aside from the obvious transportation costs of ships, trucks and fuel – there are the companies that are subsidized by our tax dollars to run the recycling programs.
There’s only one thing that pays to recycle – and it’s the one thing that you can actually make money from if you collect it – and that’s aluminum cans. It costs less to recycle aluminum cans then it does to make them from raw materials.
Unfortunately aluminum is the 8th-most recycled material behind things like cardboard, glass, plastic, scrap metal and copper.
Plastic bottles are the villain. The hardest to recycle, the most prolific and the most environmentally damaging. All of the other major recyclables are natural in origin: glass comes from Silica sand, cardboard from wood… etc. Plastic – not so much.
Reduction
Our dump trip is done and we’re at a local beach. The trades have died and it’s getting muggy as we eat our lunch under the ironwood trees.
“What did we learn about recycling today?” I ask the kids.
“That it costs a LOT OF MONEY to recycle things – except for aluminum cans!!!!”
“Yes – that’s true. But I think we learned something even better… didn’t we?”
The kids look puzzled and unsure. I hadn’t come out and said it but I was hoping it was on their mind. So I prodded…
“One of you said ‘it doesn’t make sense’ to buy a bottle of water, drink it in 5 minutes, then recycle it or throw it away. The water comes from the sky right? It comes from our sink, it comes from filters in our refrigerators… why do we need water sent to us on trucks and ships from across the world if we have it right here?”
“I’m never going to drink from ANYTHING but my blue bottle EVER AGAIN” says one of the kids.
“You need to stop going to Costco dad” says another…
