Allan Schnaiberg used to think that recycling could lead us to the promised land. He thought it offered not just environmental benefits (by reducing the amount of garbage going to landfills and incinerators), but also economic benefits (by allowing people in a community to make money from waste) and equity benefits (by providing decent jobs for poor people in a community). He saw these benefits as mutually reinforcing, and he thought that if all three Es–environment, economics, and equity–could be achieved at once, recycling could help people realize that all three are equally important and not in conflict. Recycling would then be seen as more than just a holding action against litter or just one more environmental activity. It could start people thinking and working in a new and better way. “It was a kind of golly-gee-whiz thing,” the Northwestern University sociologist says, “like the story about the janitor in the burlesque house on payday–‘You mean I get paid too?’”
Deposit and recycling programs are rooted in fundamentally different environmental philosophies. The deposit system is based on the assumption that containers can be reused as they are. Recycling programs rest instead on the assumption that used glass bottles, for instance, must be broken up and remanufactured into new bottles or other glassware—a process that uses more energy than reusing them, and creates more pollution than simply washing and refilling them.
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The two programs also differ profoundly when it comes to economics. The deposit system embodied in bottle bills harnesses the power of money, because consumers who choose convenient throwaway packaging pay up front, in their deposit, for the cost of dealing with it. If they throw away the empties, their deposits are still waiting at the store or collection center to pay scavengers who gather and return them. In a well-run deposit system, people don’t need to be guilt-tripped or browbeaten to get them to clean up any more than they need to be reminded to pick up money lying in the street. Nor do taxpayers have to shell out for extra trucks and garbage workers to collect recyclables. Properly set up, the process is self-financing.
The packaging industry still opposes deposits, but it now prefers to undermine support for them by promoting standard recycling. Its nonprofit mouthpiece, Keep America Beautiful, Inc., promotes volunteer cleanups through its hundreds of state and local affiliates. Its Web site, kab.org, reminds us that it produced the 1971 “crying Indian” public-service ad (“People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It”), and it now gives out an Iron Eyes Cody Award, named for the actor in that ad. Last year the award went to a Texas waste-company manager who’d created a “Captain Waste” hero figure to encourage people in Brazoria County to recycle more.
Because the volunteers felt guilty about using disposables, and because local governments were already in the garbage business, this kind of recycling wasn’t a hard sell. But why should volunteers and local governments assume the burdens imposed by disposable packaging?
To make sure that only big garbage companies could provide residential recycling in Chicago, the city required would-be contractors to lay out up to $8 million apiece to build four material recycling and recovery facilities (MRRFs, pronounced “murphs”). Waste Management won the contract. Under the plan, the city would use its garbage trucks to pick up the now-famous blue bags of recyclables and bags of ordinary garbage at the same time. Once hauled to a MRRF, everything would be dumped onto conveyor belts, and workers would sort recyclables from the rest.
Labor-law loopholes allowed the city and Waste Management to have no responsibility for the working conditions. “Waste Management used a temporary job service, Remedial Environmental Management (REM), which operated much like a day labor exchange,” write Schnaiberg et al. “Workers at the Waste Management MRRFs were not formally employees of Waste Management or REM. Because of the recent changes in labor laws, they were initially classified instead as ‘consumers’ of REM’s service. They had no legal rights as workers and no legal relationship to Waste Management. REM was able to pay the workers very low wages and treat them poorly without technically violating labor laws.”
