In his recent guest column, “Worry a little less about recycling at the end of 2020,” Bowdoin College student Andrew Meredith appears to argue that each of us is such a small part of our environment that we need not be individually concerned about what we do to it.
However, the people of Brunswick, Bowdoin College, Maine and the nation understand that nothing happens on a large scale through divine intervention. Big changes happen because individuals make them happen through our individual efforts as recyclers, smart shoppers, waste reducers, and direct communicators with our town council, and our state and national legislators.
Single-use plastic bags that were for so long a plague on our local environment were banned in Brunswick and then statewide, and will be banned again in January 2021 after a hiatus driven by COVID-19. They were banned because individuals made enough of an effort to force the issue.
Moving our Municipal Solid Waste collection and recycling to a carrier that understands recycling and the proper waste-to-energy practices will not happen unless individuals take a stand and demand it.
LD 2104 is a proposed statewide law designed to reduce solid waste through the use of less and better packaging by making producers and manufacturers responsible for it. While it has the strong support of our local legislators, passage of LD 2104 will not happen until individuals demand that it happen.
From a more immediate and practical standpoint, when we put glass into the recycle bin today, it is not recycled at all by Casella Systems, who is our current town trash processor. That can be as much as 40%, by weight, of our Municipal Solid Waste. Putting it into recycling costs us about $180 per ton while putting it directly into the trash cost about $80/ton. That affects everyone in town. From a town official standpoint, being attentive to that problem is the sort of individual effort that can make a difference.
The use of proper Waste-to-Energy systems by our Municipal Solid Waste processor has been proven to produce very large savings in the greenhouse gasses our waste ultimately generates. The Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee has shown those sorts of cost and GHG savings to the town to press the change to a processor who can do both proper recycling and waste-to-energy. The members of that committee, and the others in town who gladly assist our efforts, understand that. We understand that it is very much our personal, individual efforts that add up to municipal, state, and national changes on a large enough scale that even he can see their effects.
Recycling is, of course, only one part of what we need to be doing, but requires our understanding of how that relates to the rest of the environmental issues of our day. In the bigger picture, rather than weakening our individual commitment and efforts in a quickly changing world of recycling and sustainability, it is ever more important that individual efforts become stronger and more insistent.
Harry Hopcroft is a member of the Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee; the views expressed in this column are his own.
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