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THIS FEELING
OF indecency has been spreading across New York City ever since Mayor Mike
Bloomberg ended the glass and plastic portion of the city’s
much-ballyhooed recycling program last month. That’s the same program that
the city has proudly hailed as “the most ambitious in the nation.”
Translating for you out-of-towners, this is typical New York bluster,
considering that the city recycles only 18 percent of its trash, as
compared to Los Angeles’s 44 percent, Chicago’s 47 percent and Seattle and
Minneapolis, which recycle a whopping 60 percent of their trash. And
that’s the EPA speaking. |
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But the numbers
don’t speak for all New Yorkers. Many of us were recycle-holics,
separating trash in our various bins like Vegas dealers shuffle cards to
wretched gamblers. “It just feels sinful and wasteful to just throw away
glass and plastic now,” said a friend of mine, the always-thrifty poet
Alex Beers (who did not compose the epic poem, “The Waste Land,” but
is working on a delightfully understated sequel called, “Hey, Mayor
Bloomberg, Kiss My Glass!”). “I know we used to do it without even
thinking, but now, every time I go to throw away glass, my arm recoils.”
New Yorkers who have been dutifully
separating out the glass, metal and paper from our trash for more than a
decade are now being subjected to a Maoist-style Cultural Revolution
re-education campaign to get us to smile as we throw away perfectly good
used glass containers. The famed “three R’s” of the environmental
movement—”Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”—have become “Rebel, Refuse, Relax.”
You’d think that residents of a city that
produces 11,000 tons of trash per day would have long ago inured
themselves to the guilt of contributing to this city’s huge “waste stream”
(a term we use, by the way, because it gives us the warm feeling that our
garbage is effortlessly flowing away from us). You’d think we would have
been so overwhelmed by the magnitude of our filth that we’d all be sitting
around discarding the excessive wrappings from our bon-bons and saying,
“Oh, what’s one more bag of garbage in the overall scheme of things?”
But actually, it’s been quite the opposite
in this dirty, stinkin’ town. Despite predictions that New Yorkers were
profligate, hateful, dirty people who live in apartments so small that
they would never give up valuable living space for three more garbage
bins, most of us actually complied willingly when the recycling law went
into effect a decade ago.
Full disclosure?
My wife and I were a bit maniacal about it. I mean, we’re the kind of
people who pick up soda cans on the street and carry them home so that
they’ll end up in the recycling pile rather than the normal trash. Fuller
disclosure? We sometimes start screaming at complete strangers if they so
much as drop a bon-bon wrapper on the street. Fullest disclosure? We’re a
pair of total freakazoids. |
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But now that the glass portion of the city’s recycling program is gone,
I’ve found that my wife and I are not alone in our trashy abnormality.
“I feel indecent when I throw a glass
bottle down the compactor chute. It’s demoralizing,” said Rebekah
Creshkoff, a perfectly normal, stable New Yorker, who nonetheless recently
sent out a mass email urging a form of civil disobedience that you just
gotta love: She’s urging friends and colleagues to mail their now-useless
glass and plastic bottles to the mayor’s City Hall office.
Creshkoff recently sent off her first shipment, a
package of 14 containers. Unbeknownst to her, an upstairs neighbor, who
hadn’t even received Creshkoff’s email, had already organized his own
glass mail campaign. “People feel the need to do something,” Creshkoff
said. (For the record, a mayoral spokesman said that City Hall has seen no
noticeable increase in deliveries of garbage to the mayor. Reading between
the lines, though, you can’t help but notice the suggestion that the mayor
already receives some trash in his daily mail.)
The urge to mail one’s garbage to the mayor is just one
example of the backlash that’s happening all over town. Young urban
hipsters are now carrying bags of glass and plastic to their parents’
houses in the suburbs like they once carried bags of laundry (OK, so maybe
I’m not young or even a hipster anymore, but I know as a fact that I’m not
the only one doing this). Others who work outside the city say they are
carrying bags of recyclables with them and depositing them in their office
trash bins. One man even told New York magazine that he filled a suitcase
full of glass and plastics and took it with him—as a carry-on, no
less—when he went on vacation to Michigan. (Granted, that was in New York
magazine, but, you never know; it might be true.) |
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New Yorkers may
be the first urbanites to begin commuting and traveling with their trash,
but we certainly won’t be the last. The city is just the first of an
expected avalanche of big urban areas that will retrench or rework their
recycling programs or recoil from them altogether. The Big Apple is the
canary in this garbage-filled coal mine.
The stated reason for abandoning glass recycling is that recycling the
stuff costs more than just throwing it away. More than a decade after
cities started recycling glass, they’re suddenly learning that there’s
just no market for used Snapple bottles, Gallo wine jugs and those damn
baby food containers that keep piling up (if only you could breast-feed
these kids until they’re 18?).
The mayor
says it costs New York $240 to recycle each ton of glass, yet only $130 to
throw it away. Do the math: Unless the city can find someone who’ll pay
$111 for a ton of dirty glass, we’re just going to dump it (most likely on
our friends in Pennsylvania). But people like Creshkoff—and, more
important, I think we’re throwing the baby out with the glassware by
frittering away a decade of teaching people how to play with their trash.
Now, the whole city has a case of trash-lash.
Fine, so if it’s not profitable, we should find a way to make
it profitable, Creshkoff said. We could bring back Glasphalt. We could
reprocess plastics into park benches. Or we could make polar fleece out of
it. Who, in this sentimental age, wouldn’t buy a polar fleece jacket that
said “Made in New York” on it?
Mayor
Bloomberg would be well-advised to listen. I’d hate to see City Hall
become a waste-transfer station. Not.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post and a
sportswriter for The Brooklyn Papers. His Web site is at http://www.gersh.tv/
© 2002 Newsweek,
Inc.
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