A tour of a slaughterhouse could change your mind. But peer inside a recycling plant and you will bury your dreams of saving the planet forever.
As recycling stakes bold claims on what it can do, it's only fair we hold it to a higher standard. Yet an inquiry into recycling is so unpopular even Netflix won't green light a muckraking documentary. That's probably because we see it as a secret weapon against climate change. This might be the only time when herds of children are harnessed together for a good cause.
That's where it all starts: the outstretched palm of a child's hand when they pick up their first discarded Pepsi can under a park bench. And in them a seed is planted that will someday deliver us from the intervening mountains of waste. At least that's what I was lead to believe.
But the inconvenient truth is not that we are killing the environment, it's that our solution is making it worse. Mass electrification substitutes fossil fuels with the suspiciously similar method of extraction mining and refinery processing of materials. Some calculations estimate the pollution generated may actually be worse.
It doesn't have to be this way. Given the chance, recycling could supply all of our needs. But we have to be clear on where it is right now, and where it should be.
My connection to the recycling industry evolved from a simple request for used lithium-ion batteries in a pilot project. We wanted to find a way to recover the minerals present in the battery and concentrate them back into the inputs manufacturers would use for a new battery. And it did seem simple at the time.
What I soon discovered is there really is no such thing as a recycler. What we would call a recycler is more like a concierge, or dispatch service. And the material is then routed through collectors, sorters, and various layers of processors. For some reason, none of them had any batteries, and wanted nothing to do with them. So where did they all go?
For all our talk about sustainable development and ecological responisbility I would never have guessed that we were exporting them by the boat load. Along with every other conceivable stream of trash we produce. And if you've drawn the connection to the pacific garbage island, you're not alone. This merry exchange went on for the better part of three decades and was only brought to a close in 2017.
You would think this would free up the supply of batteries for recycling. Yet after they were hauled off the boats they most often sit in massive stockpiles, patiently waiting while we work out a solution.
But that's not entirely accurate, we did find one solution. This was clarified for me when I approached scrap dealers and they spelled out their role: finding a home for material nobody wants. Not an easy task. Although the only home I ever saw was the inside of a furnace.
I don't have any polling data to back this up, but I strongly suspect most people would be horrified to learn every battery they dropped in an orange bin has literally been going up in smoke.
But most batteries won't make it that far. A laptop, for example, often ends up at a refurbisher. If they find the battery still holds a charge they slap it in another laptop and sell it to someone else. If not they backhaul it to Mexico. That means that laptop you learned to type on hasn't been turned into an electric scooter, it's most likely sitting at the edge of a Mexican village seeping into their drinking water.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. When the lithium-ion battery was released to market Francis Fukuyama had just proclaimed the end of history. And just like the triumph of liberal democracy, the lithium-ion battery remains unchallenged.
It was widely versatile and found use in power tools, grid storage, consumer electronics, and electric vehicles. Tesla has lead the automotive industry into producing a growing market share of battery-powered vehicles, and Apple continues to reduce the dimensions and increase the power of its devices. All with the same battery.
But what made the lithium-ion distinct from its predecessors was the materials used in its manufacture could be profitably recovered and reused. At least in theory.
Yet for all our disruptive innovation and creative destruction, we still haven't figured out the how to recycle them. And it's hard to divide the blame fairly since it goes far beyond the scrap yard. Manufacturers each use proprietary chemistry and packaging, Governments too often are inconsistent in their pick-up, sorting, and incentive schemes, and worst of all the batteries frequently explode without warning.
We’ve all been dreaming of a battery powered future that simply doesn’t hold a charge. Stumbling along in a haze where we look good, feel good, and accomplish nothing. But I think we can skip over the stages of grief and embrace acceptance.
It may feel like recycling is a fraud and everyone is on it, but the Occam's razor for recycling would be more like: problems are easier to solve when you can turn a profit.
Until we figure that out, we’re all in this together. And that means if we are serious about saving the planet, we can’t be content on that ordained child to free us with their genius.