Last fall, I had the dubious distinction of being elected Recycling Chair of my fraternity. It was basically one of those, "who's left to dump this position on? (snicker, snicker)" sorts of things. With this high honor went the duty of cleaning out recycling bins every week and sorting through the contents. Not exactly a job people fight for. But I like to think of myself as a somewhat environmentally conscious individual, so I took to my duties with some gusto, and have since made some observations of things I had seen before, but forgotten. It really boils down to this: You can set a recycling bin next to a trash can. You can give a short lecture and blitz on the use of the recycling bin, what goes in, etc. You can hang up a sign above the bin that tells people what to put in. The end result is there are three cans in the recycling box, and a trash can full of newspapers, plastic, and other recyclables.
This phenomenon puzzled me a bit. When living in dorms, I had always figured people didn't make use of the recycling boxes because they were in the basement, and nobody wants to walk up and down flights of stairs to drop off an old pop bottle. If it's not laziness and not a lack of knowledge, why would the recycling bin not be utilized? I am fairly certain that it is not a premeditated act of environmental sabotage when people use the garbage can rather than the recycling bin. I don't think there is anyone on campus thinking "I'll show those damn environmentalists!" as they toss their Three Musketeers wrapper in the garbage pail. So, if it's not a matter of laziness or one of malicious intent, why does most waste end up in the trash instead of the recycling bin? For that matter, why does trash end up in a trash can at all and not on the floor?
Americans produce obscene amounts of waste every day, yet there are not piles of trash everywhere. We go through great pains to dispose of it all in a way deemed proper. It would be much easier for us to just drop waste on the street, in the fields, anywhere we felt convenient. Why don't we just toss our trash out the window of our room? You're sitting there, you've had a long day, you have a pizza box with a half slice leftover in it. Why not just toss it out the window or tuck it under your roommate's bed? Why go through the trouble of even walking down the hall to the garbage pail when sweet deliverance from refuse is so close at hand? The only reason I can think of is that we are taught not to. We are not only taught "trash goes here" from the time we are very young, this thinking is reinforced throughout our lives by peers, rules, and laws, society at large. Emptying a sack of garbage from the top floor of MidFayerweather Hall onto the lawn below might be the easiest solution to keeping your room tidy, but it violates social mores that are deeply institutionalized in our culture. Not only would you have Safety and Security knocking at your door the day after the "window ejection" method of waste disposal was employed, your friends would think you were a psychotic slob.
Seventy or a hundred years ago, this situation would not have been the same. If you lived in a rural area, you dumped things wherever you felt like dropping them, and that was that. When I was a little tike, I would wander around the hills near my house, and one of the main attractions was the old trash piles of homesteaders -- Piles of dishes, cans, bottles, most anything you can imagine at random locations all over the place. We even found a smashed up old truck, complete with a license plate indicating the year of issue, 1932. What this tells me is that within the last half century, many Americans have gone from accepting random trash dumping, to accepting that it is wrong. Even those living in fairly remote settings now drive their trash down to the county landfill and pay the fee to deposit their leftovers rather than burying it in the backyard. Granted, people do litter, but it is not a socially acceptable activity. A litter-strewn area is looked upon with contempt, and we go so far as to hire workers to clean these areas.
What does this mean to the average recycling bin at Dartmouth? If our society can change to the point where we unthinkingly utilize centralized trash disposal, we can definitely change to the point where we unthinkingly utilize centralized recycling programs. Hopefully this process won't take fifty years, but I am optimistic that it will occur, and will eventually lead to a more resource-conscious culture. If we can become a "throw-away society," I am certain we can become a "recycle-today society."
