‘Ōlelo No‘eau

Waiho ka-helahela o Kalaupapa.

Kalaupapa lies in full view.

Said of anything that is obvious or lies exposed.

Learning Outcomes

1. Students will be able to describe the origins and nature of trash and the environmental impacts of different approaches to dealing with trash.
2. Students will explore the advantages and disadvantages of recycling, waste to energy plants, and other alternatives to dealing with trash, especially as they relate to Hawaii.

The problem with trash

In some ways, our modern problem with trash is a relatively new phenomena that is the result of industrialization, new chemistry, and capitalism. Until fairly recently, most trash was organic and could be easily decomposed close to home, where it actually improved soil quality. Archaeological middens might contain shells, bones, broken ceramics, or remnants of organic waste but these are relatively inert and contain little risk of pollution. In the poor tropical soils of the Amazon, sites of human habitation developed a rich dark soil that was the product on indigneous management building up soil quality over generations through careful management and the addition of organic matter.

In contrast, our current waste streams degrade the soil and environment. Our landfills are filled with petroleum based plastics, which might take millenia to degrade and are toxic. So much of what we use are single use plastics, paper, packaging, and other products designed to break, wear out, or become obsolete, requiring us to purchase new products. Even waste like food, wood, and yard waste that could potentially be composted and turned into new soil sometimes ends up in landfills where it causes environmental damages. This is a systematic failure in how we think about trash. The assumption that we can just put it out on the curb and then it goes away and we don’t have to think about it anymore is a part of this problem.

Of the 292.4 millions tons of trash produced in the US, the Environmental Protection Agency calculates that 69 millions tons are recycled, 25 million tons are composted, and 34.6 million tons are burnt to create energy. However the largest single quantity, 146.1 million tons or about half of the waste produced, is sent to landfills. There it sits and without sunlight or water, even the potentially biodegradable stuff doesn’t break down. Nowadays, landfills are lined with heavy plastic liners to prevent toxic sludge from leaking into underground aquifers.  Landfills also produce methane, a greenhouse gas more damaging than carbon dioxide. Landfills are usually located in communities with relatively little political clout, often poor, non-white, and marginalized.

Each person in the US generates, on average, 1704 pounds of trash a year, an astounding three times more than the global average.^[1] Some countries, like South Korea, have similar standards of living but generate only half as much waste per person. This is because South Korea has implemented a number of solutions. They charge households for the volume of trash they produce, they have a separate collection system for food waste which is transformed into animal feed, extensive recycling systems, refill systems for bottles, and a plastic bag ban.^[2] These solutions came about because of their difficulties in finding new landfill spaces as communities pushed back.

Recycling

There are some positive trends in the US. For example, recycling and composting have been increasing over time with larger and larger amounts of most materials being recycled. This is especially true for paper and yard waste. However, not everything is easily recyclable and there are significant financial and material challenges. For example, glass is heavy to transport, hard to process, and comes in multiple colors which can make it difficult to sort and recycle. Despite that, it can be recycled infinitely and is relatively harmless in the environment if discarded.

However, the US only recycles about a third of it’s glass, compared to over 90% that is recycled in most European countries. One reason for this is that the US generally lacks multi-stream recycling processes which is widely practiced in Europe, where consumers separate out different types of materials for recycling, makes it cheaper and more efficient for glass recyclers but more expensive for municipalities. In addition, glass recycling actually lowers the temperature required to make new glass, saving on energy costs and reducing carbon emissions.^[3]

Paper is relatively easy to recycle. The process removes ink, adhesives, staples, and other impurities, reduces the paper to pulp and then uses it to make new paper. Each time it is recycled the length of the fibers is reduced and it can be recycled seven times before it must be mixed with new materials. There are multiple grades of paper based on the length of the fibers and the processing. Paper can also biodegrade quite easily and be turned into compost. The majority of paper is recycled in the US. Recycling papers reduces the amount of forests cut down to produce paper, uses less energy and thus fewer carbon emissions than making paper from trees, and also reduces the amount of water and air pollution in the paper manufacturing process.

Green waste can also be easily composted and turned back into productive soil. If you have a yard, this can be accomplished at home quite easily but in many places yard waste is collected and turned into new soil on a large scale. Hawaiian Earthworks on Oahu and the Big Island collects the green bins for the counties and then creates soil and compost blends that it sells back to consumers for garden and landscaping. They recycle 140,000 tons of green waste, food waste, and wood every year. Industrial scale composting happens a lot quicker and can provide an important service.

The Problem of Plastics

Plastics, however, are in a league of their own in terms of recycling challenges.  Despite being used for over 70 years, we have made very little progress into effective recycling programs. Recycling programs for plastics are often discontinued or reduced instead of growing and expanding. Some of this is due to the nature of plastics themselves. Plastics are made from oil which is formed into long strings of polymers and then other chemicals are added to make them durable, hard, and suited for a given purpose. There are hundreds of different types of plastics making it very challenging to sort. Within these, there are seven categories, often indicated by a number, or resin code, within the recycling triangle. Some of these like numbers 1, 2, and 5 are relatively easily recycled by being melted down and molded into new shapes. However, each time it is recycled, the quality deteriorates and so the number of possible uses shrinks. In addition, number 3 plastics are toxic when heated and generally unrecyclable.  Number 4 includes plastic bags which are difficult to sort and clean and so are generally not recycled. Category 6 is polystyrene, or styrofoam and is also generally not recyclable. Category 7 is a catch all category that contains hundreds of different plastics, making them impossible to sort and recycle. This includes many of the plant derived plastics that are theoretically compostable although there is nowhere in Hawaii that has the industrial scale composting required so they all end up in H-power to be burnt. Given that we all use plastics every minute of every day, we generally know almost nothing about them.

Dave Hakkens, a dutch industrial designer, has created a website and movement for small-scale, local, plastic recycling. He built and has shared open source designs for building a handful of machines needed for recycling plastics and turning them into other useful items. His website, precious plastics, contains tutorials, resources, and information needed to collaborate with others in recycling plastics. Although this kind of artisanal plastics recycling is probably never going mainstream, the information on his site explains processes that are usually invisible and invites us to learn about and reexamine this material that we mostly see just as trash.

Furthermore, many plastic items contain the recycling triangle without a number, which makes it even harder to sort and recycle. Much of the push towards recycling and labeling of plastics with the recycling triangle has come from the plastics and oil industries in an attempt to mislead people that most plastics can be recycled, even when it is rarely possible to do so economically and effectively.  This means that recycling companies are going out of business as often as new ones are opening up. As consumers, we usually do not have access to companies that recycle most types of plastic. With little public education about these processes, most people put things into recycling bins that are not actually recyclable, increasing the cost to sort.

In Hawaii, for instance, do you know what numbers of plastics can be recycled? If you don’t, you are probably recycling things that can not be recycled and making recycling more difficult in Hawaii. In Hawaii, like most places, only plastics 1 and 2 can be recycled. Wish cycling, or putting things into the recycling bin that you wish would be recycled, is counter-productive and not sending a message to anyone except that consumers are unwilling to actually learn about what can be recycled and municipalities are not very good at educating the public.

Given the complexities of recycling, many areas do not have programs and so many  people live in areas that do not  even have the option of recycling. Other people, especially in developing countries, live in areas without adequate solid waste disposal, meaning that thousands of pounds of plastic wash into rivers, streams, and eventually into the ocean. The great Pacific garbage patch is a gyre in the North Pacific between Hawaii and California that contains huge amounts of plastic.

As plastics break down, they become smaller and smaller. These are called microplastics. These tiny particles can be eaten by fish and release chemicals that mess with their endocrine systems and harm them. Microplastics are becoming ubiquitous throughout the oceans and are found throughout the food chain and biomagnified as predators eat smaller fish that have ingested microplastics. Recent research shows that microplastics are present in human blood with unknown health implications.^[4]. Microplastic have been found throughout the planet, even in the Arctic and areas far from human activity.

Solutions to Reducing Trash

Currently in the US, the majority of municipalities charge residents a flat fee for trash pick-up, providing little incentive for residents to reduce the amount of trash they generate. In some places, they charge for trash based on weight or volume, encouraging consumers to reduce the trash they produce. This program is called pay as you throw or PAYT. It is currently used in many cities across the US, Canada, and Europe. When it is implemented, the amount of recycling and composting usually increases whereas the amount of trash is reduced. In Massachusetts, towns that had PAYT programs produced an average of 1,239 lbs per household whereas towns without these programs generated more than 500 pounds more per household, almost 30% more.^[5]

These approaches are significantly more effective if they are combined with recycling and composting programs that provide people alternatives to sending things to landfills. The largest shift comes in consumer behavior as people think twice about buying products with excessive packaging and instead  donate or resell items instead of tossing them out.

Because of the inherent difficulties in recycling, there is always a lot of confusion around what can be recycled and what can’t. As we discussed earlier, some of this confusion is caused by companies mislabeling. In the US, many products contain the recycling symbol, even though only number 1 and 2 plastics are actually recyclable. This causes confusion among consumers and raises the costs of sorting recyclables. In addition, US consumers are pretty bad about cleaning out their recyclables, making large amounts of potentially recyclable materials contaminated and ultimately end up in landfills.

Residential recycling programs can also be expensive to maintain and are constantly being shut down as prices fall for recycled materials. Much of the recyclable material in the US is shipped to other countries for processing. China was the preferred destination for most recycling until a 2018 policy when China refused to take the world’s trash, challenging recycling companies across the US to find other buyers.^[6] Often recycling is shipped to countries with lax environmental and labor regulations, resulting in harmful industries that exploit local populations and poison their environment. The invisibility of these global supply chains make us unaware of the consequences of recycling. These impacts do not mean that we shouldn’t recycle, simply that we need to do so on ways that treat the workers fairly and while protecting the environment.

Another way to encourage recycling is through a bottle deposit. Consumers pay an extra five cents when they purchase a plastic beverage bottle, glass bottle, or aluminum can. They can then return the bottle or can for 5 cents once it is empty. These programs are very effective at improving the recycling of cans and bottles but do little about the rest of plastics in the waste stream. In Oregon and Michigan, the only states with a ten cents bottle tax, roughly 90% of cans and bottle are returned whereas the five cents tax in Hawaii results in about 60% being recycled.^[7]  This makes single use cans and bottles slightly more expensive to buy but then returns that money to consumers who recycle. The amount of money paid for each bottle is so small that homeless people are often the ones that do most of the recycling at beach parks and other sites across the state.

The problem with both PAYT and bottle taxes is that they place the cost and burden of reducing waste on the consumer instead of the corporations that are producing the excessive or non-recyclable packaging to begin with. Extended Producer Responsibility Laws are laws that require companies to pay part of the fees for dealing with the waste generated by their products or to take back their products at the end of their lives.  These laws can incentivize companies to produce packaging that is compostable, refillable, and minimal. These laws can also encourage companies to develop appliances and larger products that can be fixed or updated instead of replaced.

This is the opposite of planned obsolescence, where companies design products that will break so that you need to buy new ones periodically.^[8] This process began in the 1920s with lightbulbs designed to burn out but has been expanded to include fast-fashion, iphones designed to be slower over time, or cars designs changing ever few years so that they look old while still being full functional. There is some push back and governments are working on right to repair bills which require manufacturers to allow consumers to repair products or developing repairability indexes to compare and rate different companies on the ability of their products to be repaired.  Companies need to develop new business models which allow for upgrading, repairing, and maintaining products instead of throwing them away and buying new ones.

Another solution that focuses on companies is to ban certain kinds of plastics like disposable plastic bags or styrofoam. Hawaii was the first of 8 states in the US that has a ban on plastic bags. You can receive paper bags but need to pay 15 cents per bag. Disposable utensils and containers should also be made out of material that is biodegradable. The final phase of the law went into effect January 1st, 2021, banning restaurants from giving plastic bags and styrofoam containers. You can still buy plastic trash bags, sandwich bags, etc but commercial establishments are prohibited from providing them. This illustrates one way that governments can intervene which doesn’t do any significant harm to businesses or individual consumers. In addition, it doesn’t really address the larger issues of plastic being a part of every aspect of our lives although it does reduce one of the most egregious examples of plastic pollution and a disposable consumer culture.

A last resort, after we have taken other necessary steps to reduce, reuse, and recycle, is incineration. This can greatly reduce the amount of space needed for landfills but can release harmful chemicals into the atmosphere. The biggest problem with incineration is that it can engender the same mindset as landfills, in which trash is all something that we just throw out. In some instances, it can have the perverse impact of reducing incentives to diminish the amount of trash being generated because the trash is needed for fuel. This ignores the amount of energy and resources that goes into producing the packaging, paper, and other products that are burned. The current contract between the City and County of Honolulu and Covanta, the company that owns and operates H-power requires that the city deliver 800,000 tons of trash a year. If the City and County fails to do that, it pays fines to Covanta. This situation led a city auditor in 2017 to encourage sending recyclables to H-power, a decision which makes sense only within a system of perverse incentives.^[9] Similarly, the decline in tourism because of COVID pandemic also resulted in reduced trash and fines for not producing enough trash.^[10]. These kinds of energy agreements actually encourage waste generation and discourage the creation of alternative programs to reduce the waste stream.

What we really need to do is to recreate supply chains from the beginning and rethink how we manufacture, sell, buy, use, and then finally dispose of things. Most products are designed to be eventually thrown away, which is know as cradle to grave manufacturing. We need to recreate these supply chains from cradle to cradle. When people received fresh milk from local dairies, they would return the milk bottles which were cleaned, refilled, and then used again, for years. While this requires more labor, it reimagines what the supply chain looks like. Well built clothing can often be repaired and reused. Instead of just thinking about what we do with trash, we need to design systematic shifts how we design, manufacture, package, and use products so that trash ceases to exist.

Classroom Ideas and Disciplinary Adaptations

Social Sciences

Conduct a waste audit of your campus. Develop a survey to understand the campus community’s knowledge and opinions about trash and recycling.

Natural Sciences

Explore the chemical processes involved in creating plastic polymers and how that shapes their impact on the environment and their ability to be recycled.

Examine research into the impact of plastic pollution on marine food webs and/or human health.

Math and Business

Explore the growing business opportunities for recycling and trash reduction.

Examine the history of planned obsolescence and alternative models of marketing and sales.

Art and Humanities

Make art from trash or recycled materials.

Supplemental Materials

Books

Boo, K. (2014). Behind the beautiful forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity. Random House Trade Paperbacks.

Humes, E. (2013). Garbology: Our dirty love affair with trash. Penguin.

McDonough, W., & Braungart, M. (2010). Cradle to cradle: Remaking the way we make things. North point press.

Minter, A. (2015). Junkyard planet: Travels in the billion-dollar trash trade. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Strasser, S. (2000). Waste and want: A social history of trash. Macmillan.

Articles

Liboiron, M. (2016). Redefining pollution and action: The matter of plastics. Journal of material culture, 21(1), 87-110.

Parker, Laura (2018) Planet or Plastic: We made plastic. We depend on it. Now we’re drowning in it. National Geographic.

Websites

National Overview: Facts and Figures on Materials, Wastes and Recycling | US EPA

Daily MSW generation per capita by select country | Statista

National Geographic. Planet or Plastic.

Precious Plastics

Films

Leonard, A. The Story of Stuff 

Gabbart, L and J. Schein. (2009) No Impact Man.

Leeson, C. (2016) A Plastic Ocean.

Podcasts

Practical(ly) Zero Waste

So, Should We Recycle? : Planet Money : NPR

Waste Land: Planet Money: NPR