There were two months in 2024 where I relied exclusively on bottled-water. I was in Florida for one month, and if you have ever tried their tap water, you understand. The next month I was in Peru where I was actively trying to avoid E. coli. All these plastic water bottles - and that time I could bring water through their version of TSA - sent my millennial soul in a tizzy.
The reduce-reuse-recycle indoctrination of my youth had fell by the wayside as dehydration and gastrointestinal collapse were on the line. But most interestingly, since I’ve been back, if I’ve needed water and didn’t have my own reusable bottle with me, rather than forego the idea of hydration entirely, I just bought a plastic water bottle.
Why? Unsure. maybe I learned that the world wouldn’t end? Maybe it’s because for some reason, a cold Smart Water just hits? Maybe I justified it by reusing that water bottle so it was no longer “single-use”? I could not tell you. But I can assure you, it’s not a habit.
In this week’s episode of AfterMASH, we visit an American Public School Classic: Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. By which I actually mean, recycling because that is all I remember actually learning - Jae and Jackie, too.
I remember every year my classroom would have the blue recycling bin with a sheet of paper taped over it stating what can be recycled. And despite this, I’m not always clear on what can be recycled to this day. I’m just grateful to live in a town with single-stream recycling so that I don’t have to worry that my mistake will ruin the entire recycling collection bin.
But this episode isn’t re-hashing what is and is not recycling, because at the end of the day that actually doesn’t cut it. All those “low-waste lifestyle” lists you see, every single one of those HABITS you curate over time and beat yourself over for breaking - the totes, the reusable water bottles, the meal plans - only add up to about 1 ton of CO2 emission a year. I also have a personal hypothesis that they only encourage overconsumption - I actually spoke with a girl who for some reason needed to have a matching water bottle with her fiancé. And every time he lost his, which was often, she would buy two completely new water bottles for each of them, rather than just replace his? Wild.
One ton of CO2 emissions a year is not nothing when you’re talking about bringing the average annual carbon footprint per person from a 15 down to a 2 in accordance to the Paris Accord (politics aside). Every ton counts. Additionally, it keeps crap of out of turtles’ nostrils, which is important - because another part of my curriculum was breathing through a straw to mimic what it was like to live with COPD, and that was HARD.
Anyway, I digress. Back to carbon footprint, which is the measure of gas emissions we chose to focus on when quantifying environmental impact of human activities. The big drivers of carbon footprint: diet, where you chose to live, if/how much you depend on a car, and how often you use air travel. TLDR: if you are a vegan who lives in a city, doesn’t own a car, and choses vacation based on America’s very limited rail-system, you are winning. But, your annual carbon footprint is still about 4, which twice as much as the goal.
And that is because you are but one person. And human consumption and living habits are a small part of the environmental puzzle. Corporations and manufacturing have a ton of work to do to help reduce emissions and other variables of environmental strain such as finite resource depletion, toxin leeching, de-forestation and consequential jeopardy of species, etc.
One place to start is extended producer liability, which is a policy approach that assigns producers greater responsibility for the end-of-life management of products they introduce to the market. The goal is to encourage innovations in product design such that the product itself is less harmful and more durable. Violations lead to fines and public humiliation. Google AI says that it has affected upstream manufacturing, but I haven’t put time in to research it. So, if you know anything, comment below!
These policies apply to electronics, mercury, thermostats, batteries, pharmaceuticals, pain, fluorescent lighting, and mattress. What I suggest, is that you visit your town website to see what agreements they have for disposal of these items. For instance, you can often bring your empty paint cans to the local hardware store. Or alternatively, you can bring these items to the dump, which at least in my town is an organized Mecca of trash that they take responsibility for wasting responsibility. One day, I hope to meet Charlie Kelly and Frank there (that’s an Always Sunny reference).
Along the lines of EPLs, this research did force me to spend time on a question that floated in my mind: I assume all corporations suck. Their allegiance is to their shareholders (by definition). So, how do you know which companies are actually trying to do better and not just greenwashing?
First, there are the concepts of Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) and B Corp certification. PBCs are for-profit corporate entities who are legally obligated to aim towards “general public benefit” over maximizing shareholder profit. Some PBCs include anthropic (yes), Ben and Jerry’s (score), Bluesky, King Arthur Flour, Patagonia, Seventh generation, and a company called Tilamook (also ice cream).
A B-corp is a third-party certification issued by the nonprofit network B Lab - it is a label earned by a for-profit that completes and passes some “Impact Assessment”. The B-corp label requires companies to be transparent and legal accountable for ongoing accreditation by the B-corp. Without doing much [any] research, this sounds like saying a chicken is free-range because it gets 2 square-feet to roam as opposed to just sitting in a wired cage with a few other buddies.
Additionally, I stumbled upon three companies that seek to evaluate companies, typically in the fashion space, on their environmental, labor, and animal welfare practices. With the help of ChatGPT, I put together a table that compared these companies missions, rubrics, and findings. Then I looked at what their best, average, and worst rated companies were for the year of 2024; and then I compared their ratings for three companies. The table is below, so draw your own conclusions. My conclusion, even the “best” among them have so far to go it is simply laughable…
… and then they got by Shien ; ) (after we recorded this episode).
For a true paradigm shift in environmental responsibility and stewardship, my research has lead me to the concept of a Circular Economy. This is a model of resource production and consumption that involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling materials and products that extend the product life cycle for as long as possible. The goal is to reduce resource depletion of finite resources and minimize effects of waste generation.
You can think of this through an expansion of the original 3R lesson plan to an All Grown Up 10R conceptualization:
(source)
With these Rs in mind, your first instinct should be to refuse crap in the first place (as in, say “no”), and think about resources you already have at hand. You do not get to recycling until the eighth step…
That is also shown in the Butterfly Diagram, where the goal is to stay as close to the “body” of the butterfly as possible. Recycling, at the edge of the “stock management” wing of the butterfly, is really a last ditch effort.
Visit the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to take your own deep dives on a circular economy.
The high level goal of a circular economy is to build a modular human environment that can be assembled and then disassembled (after centuries), built without toxins, minimizing reliance on finite resources to extend product life cycle for as long as possible and reduce resource depletion of finite resources and minimize effects of waste generation.
A gleaming example of this is the Bullitt Center in Seattle. This integrated building design was made possible by a philanthropist with lofty goals. It is the greenest commercial building in the world. At least that’s what the website says. It opened in 2013 and features 500+ solar panels, geothermal walls, six-story composting toilets, and its own rain water collection system. It is built without toxins and is aimed to last for 250 years. And you bet it faced hurdles to overcome from banks who didn’t know how to back a building that was supposed to last that long, the DPH who was scrupulous about their water collection system, and manufactures who had to remove over 350 toxins from their construction products.
So what does this mean for you? Coming from someone who enjoys her suburban lifestyle and will always depend on a car: shift your mindset. Recycling is a distraction, I’d go as far to as to say a virtue signal at this point. It matters, but not nearly to the extent we’ve been told it does from an environmental perspective. Minimizing plastic can be important to you for other reasons I didn’t address in this article: it’s cheaper and it’s theorized to be better for your health (although definitions, quantifications, and randomized-control-trials yet to exist to illustrate exactly how).
Beyond that, step it up: when you see your blue recycling bin, you should be thinking “reduce” actually. When you’re looking to buy something new, take inventory of what you have and how it can make do. After that, find the scratchiest-wool-sweater-that-you-can-take-from-the-office-to-the-club-year-after-year, check-out thrift stores, take time to find companies you can endorse, and understand EPL and disposal options set up by your local municipality. These are meaningful ways to engage with your community and garner support for efforts that make a difference. Because environmental solutions are bigger than even the summation of personal efforts.
Personally, I’ve been relying on my library instead of buying books (and then, if I really love the book, I buy it on ThriftBooks), I’ve started using Who Gives a Crap toilet paper and paper towel (truly LOVE) and Blueland cleaning products (the multi-surface cleaner smells like Fruit Loops :) ), and I’m less scared of my dump because I learned that I don’t need ten forms of identification and to drag my house there to prove residency…I can just drive in. And fortunately, I have a very handy and scrappy husband to pick up a lot of slack.
But really, don’t sweat the small stuff. Even the most environmentally enlightened among us are exceedingly limited in personal impact. So if you’re thirsty, I recommend a Smart Water.
Sources
On Low-Waste Lifestyle
* If you want to calculate your every action
* Some chick’s blog post on going zero-waste
* Critical Mass Theory on wiki
* A brief LCA on a cup of coffee … Or a more comprehensive one about the lifecycle of a T shirt from Ted-Ed.
* Pantheon Enterprises
* Recycle Nation
* NY times archived article on the first Earth Day celebration in 1970
On Plastics and Health (to be taken as a preliminary medical thought process!)
* Microplastics and our health
* And this one from Harvard
* What Amsterdam has to say about microplastics
* What the WHO had to say in 2022 about microplastics
* Perhaps the OG article
* And another review
On Extended Producer Liabilities
* National Conference of State Legislatures
* Yay CT!
* CT River Conservatory,
On Rating Brands
* Re/make rubric
* Re/make links to reports and fact sheets
* Stand.Earth Methodology
* Stand.Earth 2025 Report
* Good on You rubric: Fashion Brands
* Good on You rubric: Beauty Brands
* Good on You methodology & this page on large v. small brands.
On Circular Economy
* Cervantes Puma, G. C., Salles, A., Turk, J., Rajčić, V., Muñoz Puche, A., Korniejenko, K., ... & Bragança, L. (2024). Circular economy best practices in the built environment. In Circular Economy Design and Management in the Built Environment: A Critical Review of the State of the Art (pp. 5-24). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
* https://usca.bcorporation.net/benefit-corporation
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy
And finally, the books Jackie mentioned:
* Doing Good Better by William MacAskill (I am personally waiting for it to be covered on If Books Could Kill)
* Tipping Point by Michael Pollen (who has to time of writing, escaped the aforementioned podcast’s wrath).
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