November 28, 2019–Our current environmentalist movement forgets the 3 Rs (Daily Trojan)

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Reduce, reuse, recycle: the mantra of our childhoods. One trifecta of alliteration taught us everything we need to know about environmentalism, or did it? I ask because I don’t actually see a lot of reducing and reusing. We’re big on the recycling, but the alliterative ideal of environmentalism ends there. It makes sense. Why should we alter our daily lives when we can just toss everything into a recycling bin, the environmentalist equivalent of the Catholic confessional? Some company promises it’ll hop in the ocean and wrestle my forgotten plastic straws from a poor sea turtle and recycle them into something new. What a delightful deus ex machina to the doom and gloom of climate change. Allbirds offers a $100 pair of sneakers made from recyclable materials. Neat! Pharrell wants to make textiles from plastic waste. Even better! For every asphyxiated sea turtle, there’s a new startup that promises to sell us a piece of the green revolution. Problem solved! Climate change fixed! We can all go home! Except we can’t. To begin with, there’s not actually enough recyclable plastic to go around. In the United States, less than 30% of all plastic bottles are recycled. As more and more companies hop on the recycling bandwagon, this already-diminished supply becomes even more scarce.

These upcycling sustainable fashion brands are particularly problematic because while a water bottle made of recycled plastic can continue to be recycled, the clothing pieces made from these recyclable materials will only end up back in a landfill. If we could increase recycling rates across the world, this would certainly increase the amount of plastic available to be upcycled into new goods and materials, but here’s the hard truth we’re avoiding: Recycling is not enough. There’s no way around the fact that 91% of plastic items globally aren’t recycled. Even if recycling rates increase, plastic can’t be recycled indefinitely. Moreover, plastic is manufactured from crude oil, creating carbon emissions, and a single plastic water bottle remains on the planet for 450 years or more. That’s right. Four hundred fifty years. Four hundred fifty years ago America wasn’t even a country! We need to radically reduce our consumption and rethink our consumer habits. To view the full article visit the Daily Trojan.