Zero Waste - the third generation resource theory

In his new book Limits To Power, Andrew Bacevich, writes that in his boyhood, America was an empire of production. If we used it, we made it. Today, we are the empire of consumption – if it is made anywhere, we will buy it. Bacevich thinks we have to go back to the earlier times or pay a heavy price. American hard military forces are not enough to force the world to service our consumption.

   Zero Waste fits right into the center of this dichotomy as a way to cut the wasteful society right where it counts – in their ability to throw away shoddy, cheap goods to make way for a river of new goods to be consumed. So does recycling, but not in such a positive way. Recycling is a post discard philosophy. It expedites the discard and disappearance of unwanted goods to make way for buying and consuming more. Whether the discard is followed by throwing goods into a dump, burning them or collecting goods for shipment to some other country makes little difference. The fact is that we are stripping the earth of its resources to serve the monster of American consumption. Recycling doesn’t change that in any significant way. Most of the resources that are mined and farmed do not end up as material components of finished goods. The value of goods measures the inputs that went into their production. Most of the value of goods generally resides in the function of the goods, not in their materials. The inputs contributing to that function are all of the human efforts that go into production. When a phalanx of workers are needed to produce a lamp, those workers consume continuously while making the lamps. Labor is not a resource-free input. Neither is factory construction or financing. The actual material in the lamps is but a small fraction of the resources it represents, yet recycling pretends that there is nothing else.

Worse perhaps, is the impression that recycling leaves that everything that can be done is being done. The garbage industry has climbed on board to pull this particular wool over the eyes of the public. Big Recycling is completely a garbage industry activity. Smalltime activists, thrift shops and neighborhood recycling centers manage a tiny fraction of the many tons of paper, steel, aluminum and glass that make up the recycling flows. Most of it is handled quite happily by garbage industry trucks through their garbage can collections. Recycling, as it has developed, is no longer a progressive or environmentally positive activity. Today recycling has moved from the vanguard into the rearguard. And merrily bringing up that rear, who do we find but the grassroots recycler, without the benefit of a political or environmental analysis, just assuming that surely their efforts must be a step in the right direction and the involvement of Big Garbage must be a mere, temporary aberration.

If this were all that the activist recycling community did, it would be bad enough. But recently they have gone much further and have begun to play a subversive role in the one resource theory that actually does challenge the constant discard of slightly used goods, namely Zero Waste. They have shifted the message of Zero Waste – the redesign of social production – into the trivial role they call “zero waste to landfill”. In other words, anything that keeps some filler out of a dump is to be called zero waste, even though it plays right into the hands of the garbage industry. This message is reflected in the numerous Zero Waste resolutions being passed by cities and counties who sum up the good struggle for zero waste as just recycling, recycling and more recycling. If you look up the bibliography at the Zero Waste Institute website, you can read the actual text of the Palo Alto Zero Waste Resolution. You will see in the starkest terms how the progressive message of  Zero Waste is contaminated beyond recognition into nothing but garbage management of one sort of another.

Perhaps you would like to see in these pages a rebuttal by the grassroots recycling community. Perhaps you would expect a rational discussion of the social and productive forces applied to the management of resources. Gentle reader, you will be waiting a long time. No such thing exists. There is no such thing as a theory of recycling. There are only emotional exhortations to do more recycling. That’s it! Recycling is supposed to be so obvious, so mom and apple pie that it requires no justification at all. Like religion. Like a religion. The struggle for a Zero Waste redesign of production is not going to be easy but it is solidly and rationally based and that will have to overcome.