After spending time at the Sustainable Packaging Forum 2012 and hearing some of the challenges involving recycling and the multiple approaches to it, from educating the public to spending billions on infrastructure, I couldn’t help but reflect back on a time when a ‘recycling mentality’ existed throughout America. Ask anyone who was around during the Second World War, and they’ll tell you that the country back then had an entirely different attitude toward waste and ways of handling it than it does today.
During those turbulent years, our shared desire to do whatever was necessary to help the troops and the war effort made the idea of ‘wasting waste’ totally unacceptable. Americans of all ages and from all walks of life very quickly came to realize that things ordinarily regarded as “garbage” and “trash”were actually valuable, reusable resources that could help defeat the enemy, and to cooperate in salvaging them as their patriotic duty. In effect, the customary behavior of an entire society was changed literally overnight.
But in terms of creating a lasting transformation of society’s attitude toward waste, you might say this wartime mobilization was a wasted opportunity. For when that conflict ended, the common sense of purpose it engendered disappeared. Once the pressure to recycle refuse was off, not only did people drift back into their wasteful ways, but excess consumption and the far worse waste it produced became identified with success and prosperity Like Cinderella’s coach that turned back into a pumpkin, the same material that was considered invaluable to winning the war suddenly reverted back into useless stuff to be tossed out and disposed of in landfills or incinerators. And as consumption accelerated, so did the accumulated detritus of our throwaway society, leaving vast new ‘wastelands’ in their wake.
Such casting off of the collective conscientiousness, cooperation and discipline that existed in this country during World War II, and the wisdom that went along with it, has now resulted in conditions that can no longer be sustained. In essence, the time has come for a return to the behavior that Americans found they were capable of enthusiastically embracing when they knew situation called for it. The only thing that needs to be done is to once again instill in them an awareness of the urgency of treating waste as an essential resource – as well as of the threat that the unabated buildup of all that discarded material poses to the viability of our planet.
It’s not that substantial efforts haven’t been made to revive a recycling ethic in the United States in recent years, and that these haven’t met with limited success. It’s just that where the ‘big picture’ is concerned– that is to say, the aggregation of problems faced by our society and the relative emphasis placed on each of them – the fate of our accumulated waste products seems to have been assigned a low priority. Political candidates might dwell on many diverse topics when debating the issues, for example, but how often do you hear them put forth proposals to reclaim our prodigious volumes of rubbish?
Like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, the waste problem essentially gets “no respect,” as contrasted to the way it was treated during the war years, when it was stamped “urgent” and considered an issue or prime importance. As a result, recycling programs – at least in the United States — tend to be local or regional in nature, with uneven enforcement and compliance and no real attempt to educate or convince the public of what’s at stake.
According to current estimates, some two-thirds of all municipal solid waste generated annually, amounting to approximately 165 million tons, is deposited in landfills. So we now find ourselves fast approaching a tipping point, both in terms of the depletion of the planet’s raw materials to which such waste contributes and the growing amount of space required to bury it – to say nothing of how the methane generated by all that decaying refuse contributes to climate change and the threat those landfills pose to groundwater, given the inadequacy of the measures used to seal landfills.
Our mission now should be to give Americans a renewed sense of appreciation for the value of waste and the crucial importance of salvaging, reusing and repurposing it. The more we succeed in getting that message to take hold, the more prosperity will become associated with the elimination of waste – thus restoring the pride people once took in being part of such a nationwide effort and the sense of common purpose it created. And then, perhaps, the United States can rediscover its place as an example for the rest of the world of what it means to be a ‘can-do’ country when it comes to respecting and preserving the planet’s precious resources.
