Will you be a pioneer?

Because I have lived in the Greenbelt this year, I have been lucky enough to widen my circle of caring. Sometimes we get stuck here in our Furman bubble, but becoming more aware of the wider world and the problems everyone faces, whether we notice or not, has enriched my view of the world. Over the semester, I have seen a few sustainability related TED talks–specifically, ones about plastic. One of the first things we were given as Greenbelt inhabitants was a guide of what we can and can’t recycle. However, Greenville county’s ability to recycle plastics was rather disappointing. There are 7 different labels for types of plastics that are commonly used in today’s society; however, we here at Furman are only able to recycle types 1 and 2. But as I have come to understand it, this is not necessarily because we can’t recycle other types, but because sorting through the different types of plastics has become inefficient to do when contrasted with the benefits. Somehow, I found this to be incredibly frustrating, because it truly means that people don’t care enough about the entire future of our planet to take an extra ten minutes out of their life maybe once a week to sort through their plastics when recycling. And while I’m aware that it likely isn’t that simple of a process, it seems to me that people can’t even care enough to brainstorm ideas until a feasible process of recycling these plastics can be developed.

Although humans have made great strides in recycling in past years, plastics have been most neglected. Many times a lot of plastics just wind up in landfills in poorer countries, where the common procedure is to incinerate the plastic, releasing toxic chemicals into the air that doesn’t just affects those poorer countries. Additionally, despite the fact that plastics are much more valuable than metals as well as being produced in much higher quantity, metals have a recycling recovery rate much higher than that of plastics. Unfortunately this is because, even on a large scale level, separation of different types of plastics by traditional methods is just unrealistic. But there is always something we can do. Mike Biddle is a plastic recycler that has developed a method commonly referred to as “above-ground mining.” The process basically goes like this: first, garbage is collected from landfills and somewhat traditional methods are used to separate out the plastic material from other materials. Then, the plastics are all ground down to tiny bits and separated by sophisticated machines by type and grade. They can then be melted down, made into plastic strands and subsequently chopped up into little pellets. It’s an amazing process that takes the things we have dubbed trash and produces the same material you would get from using oil.

While processes like this do exist in the world, something I was astonished by when watching these videos is that they were all talks from 4-7 years ago. I only wish that I could see more that more progress has been made in the world. We have gotten better, but the thing is that we need to get better much faster if we’re really going to have a chance at saving our world. We need innovation and passion and we need it now.

These may just be the rantings of a frustrated, partially informed college student, but if you’re still reading at this point, maybe you care enough to step up. To go the extra mile–not even a mile, the extra thought–even just every time you recycle. The quote that stuck out most to me from one of the TED talks I saw was from a client of someone trying pitch a sustainable project design. The client said, “I know it’s going to cost less, and I know it’s going to sell more. But we’re not pioneers, because pioneers have arrows in their backs.” But the speaker, Leyla Acaroglu and I can only hope that there are more pioneers out there that will take a chance and set their minds on problem solving in order to save our future.

-Noa Camp