Toxic Legacies / Filtering the Truth
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices. My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices.
My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
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Waste and Degrowth
“
Ten years ago it was widely taken for granted that garbage
tends to biodegrade inside a typical dry landfill.
Today a large portion of the public understands that,
in truth, garbage tends not to change very much at all
inside landfills. Ten years ago enlightened opinion held
that recycling was. Not only a good thing for waste
disposal and a good thing for the environment but was
also an enterprise that would pay for itself – maybe
even make money. Today most environmentalists and
many people in the general public understand that recycling
is still a very good thing but that it isn’t cheap,
and it isn’t the answer to all of our waste-disposal
problems.
”
William Rathje, Rubbish!, 1992
174
With the rise in concern of the environmental consequences of
our plastic waste, the question and discussion on how to manage
our current waste issues is becoming ever more prevalent.
There are four main principles when it comes to methods of
garbage disposal. These entail “dumping it, burning it, turning
it into something that can be useful (recycling), and minimising
the volume of material goods – future garbage – that comes
into existence in the first place (source reduction).” (Rubbish!,
1992) and take turns in their position in the hierarchy of waste
management solutions. Each approach has advantages, but
also comes with significant disadvantages. Landfills take up a
considerable amount of space, running the risk of discharging
toxic leachate and destroying land that can never be returned
to its pristine state. Incineration can cause hazardous waste to
be emitted through smokestacks, being an unquantifiable health
risk to their surroundings and creating toxic ash, which must
still be disposed of and ends up in ordinary landfill. Recycling
also results in the production of pollution and requires better infrastructure
and a more robust system as well as materials that
are made to be recycled. And source reduction on a corporate
level often leads to “burden shifting” or inflicting a smaller and
less visible amount of violence over a greater period of time.
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