Column: How California's recycling culture may have inadvertently made us even more wasteful (via latimesopinion)
The programs that you helped to start in the Bay Area — what were they intended to do?
And that actually happened in 1960, so it was before we started our current recycling movement. The sorting that was being done prior to 1960 was a holdover from World War II, where there were shortages of all kinds of materials — metals and things. It sounds like a terrific idea — recovering valuable material, recycling, maybe, what’s not valuable. Where, when, how did it go off the rails?
That was a big selling point, that we had run out of landfill space, when in fact, there was one landfill that closed out of thousands across the country. Congress set up the Environmental Protection Agency, and then we did the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act [in the ‘70s], and we had to treat our landfills differently.
Early on, there was a market for the stuff that we were throwing away — the newsprint, some of the scrap metal. First of all it went to Japan, and then Japan said, we don’t need this. Then it went to China. And then what happened? There was a paper mill in Ontario outside of Los Angeles, and there was a steel mill in Fontana, both of which closed because there were mills in China, in Asia. We made it not viable for the local mills to keep using our waste products.
Do you think that people think, when they look at a piece of plastic, it’s OK for me to buy this because somebody will recycle it and will put it to good use and make it into something else? Has that made us in a way more wasteful, less conscious of reuse?made us more wasteful.
In my mind ... the city staff aren’t aware enough of what’s going on. The cities aren’t demanding that their waste haulers give them that information, so it’s just not being shared. The waste haulers who are collecting the recyclables don’t want the public to know what’s happening. And if you’re not processing to that [recyclable-grade] quality, then you’re not meeting the standards of the city’s contract.
All I can say is that hopefully we’ll be able to use that very message to say there should be a lot less single-use plastic. We’ve managed in California now, through the activity of a lot of cities and then the state government, to put a ban on single-use plastic bags at the grocery store.
South Africa Latest News, South Africa Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Oscars: How the Doc Branch Puts Women and International Stories Front and Centre (Column)For female filmmakers in the industry, this year’s round of Oscar nominations – in which acclaimed female-helmed films such as “Hustlers” and “The Farewell” were shut out in…
Read more »
Column: Would you write a 5-star Amazon review in return for a $20 bribe?A Pasadena man found a card tucked away with his Amazon order offering a $20 payment in return for a glowing review — as long as he didn't tell anyone he'd been bribed.
Read more »
Hollywood, Our Industry Is at Stake in the 2020 Election (Guest Column)The Trump Justice Department announced at the end of 2019 that it will seek to end the landmark Paramount Consent Decrees. These decrees arose from concerns in the 1940s that a group of entertainme…
Read more »
I Wrote a Book About #MeToo and the Music Business; Here’s What Happened After (Guest Column)When I released my book, “Anything For A Hit: An A&R Woman’s Story Of Surviving The Music Industry,” in September 2018, it was a starkly different environment than when I wrote it in 2016…
Read more »
Column: Hey, Brad Pitt, we went to school togetherI was at the Mizzou journalism school at the same time as Brad Pitt; I just wish I remembered him.
Read more »
Column: The Iowa caucuses' meltdown shows that tech isn't always the solutionThe Iowa caucuses teach a lesson that sometimes technology makes things worse.
Read more »