I Was a Teenage Tree-Hugger
The story of my failed attempt to save the world
“And I….. never let the water run!” The earworm refrain echoed through my head for years as I made sure to turn off the tap while I brushed my teeth.
My school’s annual Earth Day festivities were filled with cheesy songs about the evils of using too much water or not cutting up our six-pack rings. They successfully indoctrinated me into treehugger culture, in which I felt immensely powerful for recycling my soda bottle and horribly guilty when there was no recycling bin in sight.
As I aged, I saw plenty of people taking steps to reduce their footprint. Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find any park, campus, or apartment complex that doesn’t have recycling bins, and reusable shopping bags are so popular that they’ve become a style item. Clever companies seized upon the chance to appeal to “green” customers with recycled-material products of all types. Even if these companies are guilty of greenwashing, the fact remains that consumer demand for green products persists.
We all want to feel like we’re doing our part, because many of us were raised hearing propaganda that our small actions would cumulatively save the planet.
We were lied to.
For years, I felt extremely guilty when I didn’t, or wasn’t able to, recycle. I was the type who would carry a plastic bottle with me for miles until I reached a recycling container, and I regularly rescued soda cans from trash bins. I was part of a student group who campaigned our college administration to set up recycling on campus. They did, but we later learned that they instructed custodial staff to simply dump the recyclables along with the regular garbage.
And yet, our efforts ultimately didn’t matter much. Even when recycling does get sent for processing, it might still end up in a landfill. Recycling, like anything in a capitalist world, has a market, and the buyers can only buy so much. Once the United States’ largest buyer, China, refused to import more, we were met with tons of recyclable waste that had nowhere to go.
Recycling isn’t always profitable, and as more people recycle, it becomes challenging to find a market for all that waste. Plus, recycling is a bit of an…
