Mankind is doomed. The Earth is dying. What’s the point of recycling?
Heat waves will kill millions and create numerous climate conflicts. Typhoons and hurricanes are getting more violent and more frequent. Diseases like the yellow fever and Malaria will affect many more as mosquitoes migrate to other warming regions of the world.
A third of Pakistan was just submerged under water and over the course of the next century, cities like Miami, New York, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Mumbai are expected to follow suit. More than 140 million in just three regions of the world will become “climate migrants” by 2050 according to the World Bank. And apparently there’s a bunch of unknown viruses currently sitting dormant in glaciers that could be unleashed upon us as the ice continues to melt…
The future’s looking pretty grim.
Unlike the several daily routines I try to stick to, I have two weekly routines: water my bigger plants, and take out my recyclables collected over the past several days to my neighborhood recycling store in Hong Kong, Green@Community.
One afternoon, not long after having read David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth”, however, I found myself walking over to the store and thinking, “what’s the f*cking point?”
What’s the point of taking a few minutes out of my week to properly sort all my trash into different material containers, while climate change continues to increase the frequency and intensity of wildfires? Our recycling concerns appear microscopic in the context of wider and far more devastating climate outbreaks.
Or so I thought.
After dropping off all my recyclables that day, I went for a walk along the Victoria Harbour. It offers a lovely stroll with open views of the Kowloon skyline, but as I looked closer in the water, I was reminded of how important our smallest actions are to keeping our environment — our homes— clean.
On my way home, I become more attuned to how crucial and urgent a change of behavior , albeit small, would be to creating a better, cleaner environment for generations to come, not let them clean up after ourselves and deal with the consequences of our actions — or, should I say, inactions.
Scenes of floating trash are not uncommon in Hong Kong. Sadly, in recent years, it’s become impossible to swim from any of the surrounding beaches around Hong Kong Island, Lantau Island, Lamma Island or Clearwater Bay without coming across patches of trash. This was especially bad during the pandemic and also usually in the wake of a typhoon.
But the root of the problem isn’t the trash itself. There’s so much more to it.
It’s how businesses continue to pick profits over progress; what we as consumers do with all the disposable waste we collect; how cities educate their citizens, and how accessible they make recycling a part of city life.
There’s been a lot of back-and-forth finger-pointing over the question of who should bear the responsibility for keeping our streets and oceans clean and, more broadly speaking, for climate action: individual consumers, or the companies who produce all those packaged goods.
In Hong Kong, recycling is very inconvenient.
Let alone the fact that most people living here aren’t even aware of the Green@Community stores around the city due to the inexistent promotion for them, at the moment there aren’t that many available around the city despite being the most efficient and integrated places people can rely on to sort their household trash.
I created a custom Google map to visualize how spread out all the stores currently operating around the city are. While they’re immensely useful (yet still largely unknown) for those who live within a 10-minute vicinity, their location remains widely inconvenient for a huge portion of the city.
There are a few other alternatives currently in place. Some residential buildings in Hong Kong offer their own recycling services (although not for all materials). And some streets offer public recycling bins which, despite their good intentions, often offer more scenes of littered trash around them than they do of properly sorted trash (it’s not uncommon to see regular trash being thrown into those bins simply because there were no other bins nearby, which only compounds the problem).
When it comes to recycling (or driving behavior change of any kind), convenience trumps all. Yet it seems that for those who are fortunate to live in societies where recycling is made more convenient than ever before, many still choose to dump everything in one bin — including small plastic or glass items that would take less than a single minute to clean and dispose in a separate bin to be recycled.
Our false pretext: someone else will do it for us.
In other words: let it be someone else’s problem.
If that’s our way of thinking (and the kind of mentality we choose to pass on to younger generations who will be cleaning up after us as the planet continues to get warmer and deadlier), then we are doomed.
That’s where I believe education becomes the most powerful tool we have at our individual disposal to drive bigger collective action and change. Educating neighbors, friends, social media circles and family members on how simple, quick, and convenient recycling most of our household goods can be if we choose to take a single extra minute or two out of our day to clean and properly sort items that we would choose to otherwise throw in our bin.
This is the task that I’ll be taking on over the coming weeks.
Despite feeling increasingly eco-anxious about our deteriorating planet, the act of inspiring those around me to make small individual changes makes me hopeful that we might, together, maybe, lead a movement that is far bigger and impactful than we ever imagined possible.
At least we should try.
That’s the point.
