Confessions of a Non-Recycler: The City of Houston

By Emily Garrett

The other day my friend emailed me an article from the New York Times about the city of Houston and their problem with recycling. At first glance, I was quite shocked to even read the headline because my prior thinking was that Houston has been one of America’s most environmentally-friendly, cutting-edge cities for years. However, despite my preconceived notion, Houston was rated as being “the worst recycler among the United States’ 30 largest cities.” –New York Times.

Houston only recycles 2.6 percent of its total waste, according to a study by Waste News. The article compared Houston to two other similar sized cities, San Francisco and New York, who both recycle 69 percent and 34 percent of their waste respectively. The most shocking statistic of all? The fact that Houston has a 10 year-long waiting list for recycling bins for 25,000 of its residents!

I began to ask myself how can something like this happen? I mean, it is quite apparent that people in the city are aware of the issues, and that they want to make a difference.

As I continued reading, the article noted that Houston doesn’t have zoning regulations. Ah-hah! It seemed that the city of Houston was dealing with urban sprawl; as are most of our beloved towns and cities due to exploding human populations. Therefore, keeping up with the high demands of people, their garbage, and the need for recycling programs and companies to implement and run these recycling programs is quite a feat for policy makers. In addition, the increasing amounts of garbage that the city has to deal with are easily dumped into Houston’s landfills, which have some of the cheapest fees in the entire country.

“It only costs $32 to dispose of a ton of waste here, compared with $70 in the Northeast, according to the National Solid Wastes Management Association’s latest survey, in 2005”. –New York Times

I found it interesting that others felt that the cheap landfill argument was somewhat of a cop-out, and the real culprit was the “old-fashioned thinking that is really just laziness,” said Eric Lombardi, the director of Ecocycle, the nation’s largest nonprofit recycler, in Boulder, Colo.

Mr. Lombardi’s operation claims a 60 percent recycling rate, despite landfill fees of $15 a ton, which is less than half of Houston’s costs. Furthermore, the article notes that with commodity prices at a record high, recycling can be profitable. Lombardi also believes in this potential for profit, “in my landlocked state without easy access to buyers like China, then it can be profitable anywhere.”

So what does this mean for the average college student? It means that many of us need to surpass that point of raising awareness about the benefits of recycling, and take advantage of the assets we have been given.

The recycling resources at many of today’s liberal art Colleges and Universities are in my opinion fairly sufficient. I think it’s appalling that to see people still throwing away perfectly recyclable materials into the dumpster after a long night of partying when there are people waiting 10 years for recycling bins in Houston, Texas.

My personal experience at Franklin and Marshall has been that many students are aware that we have recycling next to the trash bins, but more often than not many students see recycling bins littered with non-recyclable trash, and therefore lazily fall into the trap of the ‘Oh-Well’ and then hey too place their trash in the recycling bins. Moreover, I find that people who throw parties at school clean up the next day and disregard the fact that beer cans can be recycled! I have caught a few of my friends, who are well aware of the issues still placing both plastic and glass recyclable bottles amongst all of the other garbage after a party.

Behavior like that is foolish when we think about the situation in Houston. The Mayor of Houston states that “Houstonians can change, and change fast”. So even if you do recycle, it’s okay to remind others to do so as well.