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Paul Palmer was born in NYC, went to Stuyvesant HS and Queens College, then to Yale for his PhD in Physical Chemistry.
In the 1970s he migrated to California and started Zero Waste Systems Inc. which introduced the term "Zero Waste."
They took unwanted chemicals from Silicon Valley and resold them for reuse. They took all of the unwanted laboratory chemicals from the Bay Area and sold them for half price. They had the largest inventory in California.
His book about that experience is called Getting To Zero Waste. |
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We live in a country — a world in fact — where people think that recycling is a positive thing. Probably you the reader do too.
But have you ever wondered where that notion comes from? It doesn't come from any scientific study because there never was one. It doesn't come from seeing how effective recycling is because it always has been essentially useless.
We use up trillions of dollars of raw material every year but even at its height, recyclers dealt in millions of dollars — an insignificant few tenths of one percent. And most of what people thought was being recycled, was actually going into dumps.
The recyclers turned over most of the goods they collected to a garbage company to process and garbage companies did what they love and do best — they threw it all into a dump.
Sure, they might pick out some cardboard, some broken pieces of glass, some steel or copper. These, they bundled off mostly to China which dumped half of the dirty pieces and then did some minor refining of the rest. The plastic was useless to them, as it is to every plastic processor, being dirty and likely to clog up any extruder machine. Plastic recycling is an especially insane idea.
In 2018, the Chinese had had enough. They cut off their subsidies for American junk. Recycling, which had been on its deathbed for decades, took a swan dive into the dump where it belonged. Recycling is now totally dead, even though your recyclers and city council people pretend otherwise.
Every newspaper in the last year had a couple of stories about how recycling centers were closing and were losing money. The advocates tried storing materials they still collected in warehouses, hoping against hope it would all come back. It won't! The madness is over. The warehouses will be emptied into dumps.
So why do people believe in recycling? For one thing, recycling is not a scientific or commercial concept. It's a religion. It spreads by faith. People subject it to no evaluation or criticism. By the seat of their pants, it's given a free pass. People desperately want it to work.
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Why? Because we're all lazy. We know we make decisions to buy appliances that are unrepairable. We know we bring home huge cardboard boxes and plastic wrapping and spoiling food and we know it must be sort of wrong. Along comes someone who tells us to calm our consciences because he will reuse our garbage.
Hooray for recycling. Suddenly we don't need to have those awful doubts about being really bad, wasteful people. Suddenly our conscience is clear. Let's go out and buy twice as much useless crap and then RECYCLE IT! It's a fact that when recycling becomes widespread, garbage generation goes up. The garbage industry knows this and so supports recycling enthusiastically. It's a strange relationship for an industry that was once-upon-a-time going to go out of business if recycling became universal.
So, rationally speaking, what should we do now? What should we have begun to do fifty years ago instead of this mad obsession with recycling?
On my website, I explain that if you design your goods to have a short life and then be discarded, that is what will happen to them. There will be no hope of reuse, not even the partial, inadequate reuse represented by recycling. On the other hand, if you design your goods to be endlessly repaired and reused in all kinds of innovative ways, then THAT is what will happen to them.
It doesn't leave you and your wasteful decisions free of blame. You will have to be aware of what you are buying or supporting and why. Fundamental ideas of how to build (standardizing, modularizing, refilling and repairing) will become necessary. Short lives of junk followed by easy discard won't be available. We will have to think about what we are choosing to buy and what we do when it stops working (after a long, long, robustly designed-for life) but we can do it.
It won't depend on personal choices. Individuals can't achieve what is needed. It will require systemic, scientific and deeply researched new ways of using raw materials and designing social systems which we all sign up to. Garbage cans will disappear and you won't miss them.
Climate change demands it, and we know we have to. We should have started many years ago.
~ Paul Palmer
zerowasteinstitute.org
paulp@sonic.net
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