Philadelphia Recycling

Philadelphia Recycling

My hometown is Columbia, MD- a town where it is expected of you to recycle. Every little “village” is given assigned days to roll the recycling and trash to the curbs for early morning pickup. My area had Tuesday morning recycling and Thursday morning trash. If a neighbor does not recycle, it is heavily frowned upon and the household is usually judged as self-centered. So when I came to school in Philadelphia, I was appalled by the lack of recycling. It is hard for me to grasp the idea that people are possibly too busy to recycle or that there are no resources to do so. I am looking to find answers to why Philadelphia may have a poor recycling approach, what strategies the city is trying to implement, and how this will eventually benefit the city through the use of credible sources.

            If we lived in a perfect world, everyone would be able to recycle in order to have the smallest amount of waste that is poor for the environment. However, we do not live in a perfect world. Our world is full of economical, sanitary, and environmental restrictions. A journal article entitled “Multi-objective optimization of solid waste flows: Environmentally sustainable strategies for municipalities” by Minciardi, Paolucci, Robba, and Sacile further discuss these recycling limitations. The main topic is the difficulty to balance the importance of a system that is economically practical and environmentally sustainable. This balancing act is broken down into four categories: economic costs, unrecycled waste, sanitary landfill disposal, and environmental impact. Each of the four categories is to be kept to a minimum without raising the other categories significantly. This report enabled me to better understand the basic factors that must be taken into account when putting together a municipal waste and recycling plan. It has led me to weigh the importance of recycling against the cost and time it consumes. I find this sources to be fully credible because there are several authors, and this report was an extension of a previous article. The introduction to the paper talks about going into more depth about topics that were missed in the last article, and this leads me to believe that the peer editing has questioned a few of their facts so they are now going back to clear up any confusion. I do not doubt that this article is a credible source.

Personally, I would be willing to pay five cents a bottle to be able to recycle instead of receiving five cents in return. I currently have to walk a block out of my way to find a recycling bin for my roommate’s soda cans. However, as a city, if recycling began to cost about as much as regular trash, as a result of manpower needed, would we still be making the “green” effort? What about if miraculously our landfill space doubled in size, would we still be making the efforts to put less waste in the ground? These are questions I have not just for the city, but for the society as a whole. I want to know where that fine line between money and morals lies when it comes to the environment and the economy.

An article in the trade publication, Waste News, entitled “Philadelphia launches citywide single-stream recycling” announces Philadelphia as the largest East Coast city to move to a citywide single-stream recycling system. On July 7 2008, Mayor Michael A. Nutter kicked off the “All Together Now” recycling program allowing households to place all recycling items into one large bin. This single-stream recycling program is estimated to increase the city’s recycling recovery rate by 35% in the next two years. I find this information to be partially credible. The information on the date that Nutter announced the plan and how the plan is going to work seems to be reliable, but the estimated recycling increase does not have a source. I do not doubt that recycling is going to increase as a result of the new plan, but I do doubt that it will increase by 35%- that number just seems too high. If people are not already recycling I don’t think a new plan will completely change their mind. The article does not state where this information came from, therefore someone who knows nothing about urban recycling could have estimated the increase. Parts of this article are questionably invalid.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in an article called “Recycling is pure gold” that the city pays $28 per ton of recyclables and $62 per ton of garbage that is given to the respective recipients (recyclables to a waste-management company and garbage to a landfill). This means that if the city raised its recycling participation rate 30%, we could save $17 million dollars that could be betters spent by “improving services, cutting taxes, or repairing infrastructures.” I do not completely trust this article either. The amount of savings seems like a drastic change for people just recycling more, and I never fully trust news from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Perhaps it is because it shares part of its name with the National Inquirer, a ruthless celebrity gossip magazine- but regardless, I do not think it is completely credible. However, the calculations that it gave seemed to be pretty accurate.

The new “All Together Now” recycling program will make the recycling process for citizens comparatively effortless. You can no longer be able to use the excuse that you did not have time to separate everything or put out the recycling. Because regardless of you throwing it in the garbage or recycling, you sill have to take it out to the street. Since the city is giving out free plastic bins for your recycling, you can’t even say that the resources are not available for you to start to recycle now. I believe that this program is extremely helpful to the citizens and should enormously save money for the city. Philadelphia has created a win-win situation that solves the balancing act of economy and environment. We will be saving money and the environment at the same time with very little effort needed by citizens.

I began this project by adding false information into the Wikipedia article, “Recycling In The United States.” I added that, “Philadelphia has been rated as the #1 most-recycling city in the nation.” I figured that this piece would be removed soon after I loaded it because not only was the information false. But I did not credit a source for my rating, and “most-recycling city” is not a very technical term. All of these signs should have led someone to notice that the information is completely fabricated. However, five days later, the line is still on the page under “government involvement.” For whatever reason, the powers within the Wikipedia-world let my false information slide through the system. I initially found it humorous to put such obviously false information on the page, but now that nothing has been done about it, I am disturbed. I always thought that Wikipedia was somewhat reliable because its set-up makes it a never-ending peer editing session. But now that no one has corrected my error, I feel cheated by the website’s inability to revise articles.

As a result of the difficult balancing act of the importance of economics and the environment, it has taken Philadelphia up until this year to create a sustainable recycling program. This all-in-one program will enable the city to help the environment and save money that could be better spent elsewhere. Hopefully one day every city will have the same moral standards about recycling as my hometown enforces, hopefully.