The arc of recycling bothers me.
When I was a kid, you'd be socially shamed for not recycling or questioning it as a solution.
Moving into college, people started feeling socially safe to quietly call out that the recycling program might be net-negative for the environment.
Slowly the conversation evolved in my circles to rewriting recycling's history as a "raising awareness" program. Where the goal was to bring awareness to this issue or that issue by socially pressuring a bunch of people into sorting and washing their rubbish.
Finally we are getting to the point where we can have an honest conversation about recycling.
But it's a real bummer because we've spent _decades_ misallocating capital into potentially worthless infrastructure that fails to meaningfully move the needle on the problem.
Would have been really cool if, instead of this whole social/political signaling thing we did, we instead spent that time and tax money developing processing facilities for compostable materials that are suitable for shipping/packaging and food storage.
Many current social/political ecomovements seem to be going through the same trajectory.
When I was a kid, you'd be socially shamed for not recycling or questioning it as a solution.
Moving into college, people started feeling socially safe to quietly call out that the recycling program might be net-negative for the environment.
Slowly the conversation evolved in my circles to rewriting recycling's history as a "raising awareness" program. Where the goal was to bring awareness to this issue or that issue by socially pressuring a bunch of people into sorting and washing their rubbish.
Finally we are getting to the point where we can have an honest conversation about recycling.
But it's a real bummer because we've spent _decades_ misallocating capital into potentially worthless infrastructure that fails to meaningfully move the needle on the problem.
Would have been really cool if, instead of this whole social/political signaling thing we did, we instead spent that time and tax money developing processing facilities for compostable materials that are suitable for shipping/packaging and food storage.
Many current social/political ecomovements seem to be going through the same trajectory.