When I was in junior high, we moved into a new house much larger and nicer than the one I grew up in. It had a bigger yard and my dad installed a couple of dog pens for his birddogs. My brother and I had to mow the yards, but on my dad’s instructions we collected the mown grass and placed it in a pile at the back of the garden. We also collected and deposited the dog poop and any fallen leaves into the pile. Our part of Texas had enough rain so that the pile worked to compost the materials so we could place it back on the garden beds.

Where I live now, we collect kitchen scraps, grass clippings and fallen leaves to place in our compost pile at the back of the garden. It’s drier here in the summer, so I have positioned one of the sprinkler heads to water the pile along with the garden. Every fall, I break open the pile and separate out the rich black composted soil to place on the garden and flower beds, then return anything not decomposed back into the pile for next year.

I remember back when there was quite a bit of publicity around recycling beer cans, sponsored I think by Coors, my dad’s favorite. So, we also started recycling aluminum cans and glass bottles, reminiscent of my Dad’s youth when things were ‘tougher.’ Today, I continue to collect recyclables and happen to live where there is curbside recycling along with trash pickup. One of my routine chores is to take out the compost and the recycling, not to mention any trash we have accumulated.

It wasn’t that long ago, however, that the “Recyclable” graphic was created and began to be used for a whole slew of products. Ostensibly, if a thing had a recycle symbol, it could be reprocessed into something useable. John Kazior writes, “In the United States, the presence of the universal recycling icon on a product might lead an unassuming consumer to believe that when they toss that item in a recycling bin, it will find its way to fulfill another material function somewhere along the supply-chain.”

“Yet most of us know it doesn’t really work that way. Few of us know how it works, or if it ever really works at all … a growing number of people are learning that the circular dream of the universal recycling icon is typically not circular at all.”

“Companies can more or less get away with slapping the symbol on their packaging, regardless of how recyclable the material actually is.”

As an optimist, I believe that my efforts to properly dispose of trash and recycle what I can is important.

Kazior discusses the fact that the burden is being carried by individuals, not by companies. “It’s a reminder that at the end of the day, no design or label, regardless of how sophisticated, can enable consumers to bear the entire weight of the recycling system … If we’re lucky, we’re given a nicely designed label that may help us figure out where to put a bottle that has a 500 year lifespan — but there’s still no assurance that anyone else in the cycle is playing along.”

However, I know that whatever I do is but a drop in the necessary overall efforts. Somewhere I learned that if enough people contribute just a drop, we can flood an issue.

We should each just do our bit.

Additional information:

John Kazior, Can Better Labels Really Fix Recycling?, AIGA Eye on Design, August 7th, 2020