In the mid-nineties, I watched a recycling debacle play out in Pittsburgh.

The city had a clever program where grocery stores put your purchases into blue plastic bags, which you then put your sorted recycling into. A cartage company sent recycling trucks to pick up the bags, and workers at a plant sorted the bags by their contents.

Most folks seemed happy about it, until someone spilled the beans on a dilemma - for several months, the newspaper had been going straight to the landfill. The market value for recycled newsprint had dropped below the cost of handling it, so the cartage company had been discretely dumping it. Public outrage ensued, and needless to say, the company and the city got a lot of heat for it, and their contract was renegotiated.

In Chicago, the blue bag system was different. You had to buy large blue bags at the store, and then once you’d filled one, you tossed it in your trash can with your black-bagged garbage. The garbage trucks would take everything and then sort out the recycling later. This system was so distrusted that recycling dwindled to a 13 percent average - less than 2% in some neighborhoods - whilst nearby suburbs with sorting bins were reporting 70 to 90%.

Whenever there was any discussion about the city’s green-ness, outrage about the recycling system would close the discussion. Sick of the arguments and accusations, the mayor begrudgingly agreed to begin phasing in large blue bins and separate trucks. All that really changed was that people could now see their recycling going into separate trucks. But this perception led recycling levels to jump up, equivalent to the suburbs.

In the Fall of 2003, Chicago sanitation workers went on strike. In just a few days, the volume of garbage and recycling that accumulated in alleys was staggering. The growing mountains of black and blue bags led to a new labor agreement in only 9 days. This also made something obvious appear: The sheer amount of stuff we consume.

So many of us rank our eco-credibility by how much we recycle our paper and empty containers, that we seem to be oblivious to a simple question - how do these things get in our houses in the first place? Our consumption of goods has grown exponentially in a few generations. It started when we were all dubbed ‘consumers’, and we began defining our lives by how much we could afford to buy.

So, Is the problem the systems that can’t handle our waste properly, or the sheer volume of waste we all make?

I like to sum up the recycling problem in an analogy:

You open a bathroom door and see a person on their knees sopping up a flood of water and angrily yelling for more towels. So do you run for more towels, or do you tell the person to just stand up and turn off the faucet?

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