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“Harvard is better than Yale,” A sign in Yale Station proclaims. “In the first week of the ten week Recycle Mania contest Harvard students recycled 5.5 lbs. per person. Yalies only recycled 3.4 lbs. per person.” The Recycle Mania competition may increase recycling at Yale, but it promotes the idea that recycling is an end unto itself. Recycling a sheet of paper may be less wasteful than sending it to a landfill, but not using it in the first place would be preferable. Students should reexamine their own assumptions about recycling and environmentalism before putting extra waste in their blue bins. A majority of students support environmentalism and recycling in particular. Nicholas Hutchings, TC ’08, thinks that society should recycle even if it is not economically advantageous. “Recycling,” he reasons, “is important in order to preserve our environment.”
STEP is expanding its environmental efforts beyond recycling. Freshmen Taskforce Director Kathryn Matlack, ES ’06, says STEP will replace the Green Cup with a new competition in which residential colleges will compete against each other to reduce energy usage. STEP has already promoted energy conservation by passing out energy-efficient florescent light bulbs to all incoming freshmen. While STEP’s recent initiatives are commendable, many Americans continue to believe that recycling waste is always better than discarding it. Recently, however, some experts have questioned this assumption. Dr. Winston Porter, a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), set the first national goal of recycling 25 percent of waste by 1995. After leaving the EPA to form the Virginia-based Waste Policy Center, Dr. Porter has argued that “too much recycling can be a waste of resources.” He also believes it can be environmentally harmful to pursue ‘zero waste’: recycling or reusing everything. Porter points out that “a disposable package or container (e.g. a foam coffee cup) is preferable to a reusable one (e.g. a porcelain cup) from the standpoint of water supply and water pollution, since washing the reusable cup creates hot, soapy wastewater.” “Reusables are better from air and solid waste standpoints,” he explains, “but only if reused several hundred times.” Dr. Porter believes that recycling is an environmental tool with limited usefulness. The New York Times Magazine ran an article in 1997 by John Tierney entitled “Recycling is Garbage,” castigating the American public’s zeal for recycling even further. Tierney wrote, “Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.” In light of their limits, recycling programs need to find a balance. According to the EPA, the state of New York has an above average recycling rate of more than 40 percent. When New York City faced a budget crisis in 2002, however, Mayor Bloomberg ended unprofitable recycling programs for metal, glass, and plastic for 18 months to save the city 40 million dollars, while keeping the more profitable programs to recycle paper. The Mayor’s office revealed that 40 percent of the metal, glass, and plastic once picked up for recycling ultimately ended up in landfills because of weak demand for recycled materials. Recycling devotees expect to benefit the environment, but their actions play a limited role. Organizations like STEP must continue their efforts to move beyond just recycling if they want to give students the facts about helping the environment. Aaron Barnet is a freshmanin Trumbull College. | ||||||||||||
Leading these
and other environmental efforts among Yale’s student body is the
Student Taskforce for Environmental Partnership (STEP), an undergraduate
organization that promotes “sustainability.” Before finals,
members went door-to-door rewarding suites that properly sorted their
waste into recycling and garbage. STEP also cosponsored a study-break
at Trumbull College with Food from the Earth, offering apple crisp and
ice cream to students in exchange for their recyclables. STEP is not affiliated
with Recycle Mania, but it has run the comparable Green Cup competition,
which rewarded the residential college with the best recycling track record.