We all feel that tiny bit good about ourselves when we recycle – taking the extra effort to wash out the tins and separate the plastic containers from the food waste all in the name of the planet. When I make sure to not just toss everything in the same bin, I always feel like I deserve a little pat on the back. I’m nothing short of an eco-warrior. But, few of us think about what happens after the rubbish is taken away. Where does it go and how does the recycling process actually work? We all know deep down that nothing disappears, all that we discard ends up somewhere, but the convenient myth of our consumerist society is one of shiny, neat aesthetic pleasure and the success of capitalism rests on the concealment of the dirty truths behind the consumption and disposal of products. In other words, it depends on an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ philosophy. Recycling is undoubtedly better than just throwing things away, but where does our waste end up?
The method of reusing materials is as old as civilisation, but what the modern Western world has come to know as ‘recycling’ is inspired by a model that was introduced in the 1960s in America. It initially was presented to factories to encourage them to consider the life of their packaging after consumer disposal, inviting them to ditch single-use plastic and focus instead on reusable materials. However, this concentration was quickly shifted to the individual consumer, whilst industrial waste and manufacturer responsibility was largely ignored. Instead the model became the industry we have today, advertised as a vague, environmentally-friendly solution to waste. However, what still remains widely hidden from consumer knowledge is the amount of energy, pollution and additional raw material inputs necessary for recycling. It also produces inferior plastics, which means that you can only recycle plastic a limited amount of times because each time it is recycled it becomes less pure, or ‘degraded’.