Recycling Means More Than A Single Color of Blue
Have you ever been in a situation where you throw a bunch of paper boxes from Amazon and a whole bag of empty water bottles into the blue bins, considering yourselves have been perfectly environmentally friendly? Or have you ever been in a situation where you do not know exactly if the package is recyclable and just leave it in the black bins, thinking someone will figure it out later at the trash disposal center?
According to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), less than 10 percent of the plastic that is “properly disposed” in blue bins is able to be recycled. And it has been a bombing for us to still see ocean livings mistaking the floating plastic for food even though we think that we have done enough for the recycling process. Although the Three R’s sustainability - Reduce. Reuse. Recycle - has caught our daily life tightly, there is more we need to do. It is time for us to start categorizing these recyclable items with the help of color coding.
The single-stream recycling system that the U.S. currently relies on - a system in which all recyclable waste is disposed of into the same bin and will be sorted at the recycling facilities - puts the weight on the recycling plant. It gives a burden to employees who need to hand-pick out items with a similar disposal process since the process method of dealing with cardboard is very different from the one of recycling plastics. Thus, due to the additional cost and enormous amount of items, the hand-pick process sometimes ends up with an unbending dealing method - simply throwing them in landfills. As a result, the ideal loop sometimes is broken due to such mixed complications of the system.
As the initiator, what can we do? We may start by doing a better job of categorizing items designed to be disposed of in the blue bins. But HOW? At this point, most Americans usually refer to the Resin Identification Code. However, the misunderstanding of the RIC - a number surrounded by an arrowing triangle that is presented by most plastic products - has partially contributed to the inefficiency of the Three Rs Program. “The RIC system is not a recycle code system...as it only categorizes the types of plastic,” identified by the system administrator ASTM International. Nevertheless, the RIC system is still practical to categorize items in trash bags.
The lack of knowledge in the recycling process and the misunderstanding of the existing system hinder us from categorizing waste. Therefore, a visible definition of the property is needed to be presented on the items. In Japan, where about 84 percent of the plastic collected was recycled in 2018, trash bags are classified into colors and each region has a schedule for collecting different types of recyclable wastes. Japanese residents are required to sort their wastes into different types of colored trash bags including red ones for burnable wastes, blue for non-burnable, and transparent for recyclable. Plus, items such as plastic bottles, cans, glass bottles, and aerosol spray cans are collected on different days of the week and categorized by different colors of baskets that are placed next to the trash collecting point. The strict system with simple categorization allows Japan to effectively recycle plastic collected more than eight times that of the U.S. does. Therefore, a similar categorization process may be an effective way to confront the challenges in the U.S.
Let’s start with color-coding our trash bags with the guidance of the RIC system! The RIC system provides a guide for materials so that we can at least package items identified with the same numbers before we simply put everything together into blue bins and label them with the corresponding numbers. On the other hand, the manufacturers of trash bags should be given a standard color code during production. Later, residents should take on the responsibility to categorize the wastes according to the codes on their sides to form a habit. Moreover, if all commercial manufacturers are required to print these codes on the packaging, the disposing process will be more efficient when residents do not have to stand in front of bins, brainstorming the belongings of the items.
From individuals to businesses, every social entity should take up the responsibility that makes the word “recycling” achieve its greatest potential. Recycling is more than just a single color of blue. So why not give each type of item a color identity to make the Three Rs actually work?
