Artist’s Journal:

In the later morning, I jumped on another dump truck doing ‘co-collection’: recycling and yard waste. The team here was much younger, with just two years on the job. It was quickly evident that the men with more years on the job had learned to think about their work and the work of the department with a more ‘whole system’ perspective. The young men were more focused on their personal experience and less aware of the great waste collection system—a point made clear when one of the young men shared that there was “too much recycling” happening. I asked if the solution might be to have more teams, not less recycling, but he stated that budget wouldn’t allow for that, so the answer, to him, still seemed like people should recycle less. The irony that both teams I interviewed had opposite solutions was not lost on me.

Recyling’s biggest complaints seem obvious: people leave fluids in containers or the rain fills them up. People are confused by the recycling symbols and try to put a lot of items into recycling that aren’t actually recycled. This was further emphasized for me when I noted that the trash team had complained that residents fail to put their Christmas wrapping paper into recycling, and the recycling team complained that residents try to recycle wrapping paper that isn’t recyclable. Clearly, there is universal confusion on some aspect of recycling. Similar confusion seems to happen with pet waste and litter, and just how much can be dumped into the green bins—a bit of messaging that seemed to get distorted about fifteen years ago and was never set back on track.

No matter who I talked to, one of the biggest problems is plastic. The overreliance, the recycling variations, the sheer volume, all problematic. It gums up even the greenest of the trash initiatives. I saw this firsthand when I was invited to the landfill the next week.