Awesome post from Emaleigh Doley about Houston’s One Bin For All trash plan that won Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge:
When it comes to how citizens think about trash, Houston isn’t interested in changing culture. The Bloomberg Philanthropies website notes, “decades of consumer education have failed to significantly change behavior.”
Instead, Houston’s ambitious “One Bin for All” plan seeks to build a better way of coping with that behavior – by making it easier for people to just toss their trash and not have to think about it. According to Houston’s press release, this means creating “an innovative public-private partnership to combine existing technologies to achieve the ultimate goal in waste management – a one-bin, high-recovery system that will aim to recycle 75% of all waste.”
One Bin for All recognizes that many people in Houston are uneducated about recycling, and just plain lazy. Coupled with lack of legislation, the recycling rate in the city clocks in at just 14%, below the national average of 35%.
Mayor Parker’s answer? Open a dreamy high-tech facility and leave it to the gizmos to make all the decisions for residents, separating trash from recyclables, down to pieces of foil and bottle caps.
Beyond giving residents more convenience, Houston ultimately wants to take the load off landfills. One Bin for All would drastically reduce the total volume of waste the city sends to landfills each year, diverting an estimated 75% of materials residents discard and maximizing recycling. (See FastCo.Exist for a look at potential waste-to-energy systems Houston could adopt.)
There’s a certain kind of person who reads a proposal like this and thinks it’s repugnant. It’s a cop-out. People shouldn’t be lazy. They should care about recycling, and they should take the time to be conscientious citizens and separate their garbage, compost, etc. And I would agree it would be awesome if we lived in a world of virtuous people who behaved like that.
But that is not the world we live in. In the world we live in, people are kind of lazy. If there isn’t an immediate payoff for recycling or composting, or an immediate penalty for not doing that stuff, then compliance is going to be low. You can choose to get mad about that, or you can meet people where they’re at, and find a solution that doesn’t rely on everyone suddenly becoming less lazy and myopic.
I prefer the solution that works around the laziness, because I don’t want to live in a world with landfill landslides like the one that just happened in Williams Township.
Cool post and on the money. America has been making millionaires from developing lazy solutions for 200 years. We can do this.
Or rather than automatically thinking the worst of people (that they’re uneducated and lazy) how about a recognition that lives are pretty fucking full right now and not everything will get the attention that a 27yr old blogger thinks it should?
That being said, the purpose is to get things done, not ridicule and belittle people from an Elitist perch somewhere in a basement in NYC. This is a great path.
So you agree with me, but for some reason feel the need to take personal shots at me anyway? Very mature.
Because you lead with an obnoxious little pissant elitist approach of belittling people. You have no idea how tough it is to live today that you immediately accuse people of being lazy?
On behalf of all the hardworking people out there – not lazy, working their collective asses off to survive Obama’s new economy – who don’t prioritize the way you do, a hale and hearty “fuck off.”
I’m not belittling anyone. I’m saying it’s human nature to conserve effort. It would be nice if everybody made recycling a priority, but other things compete for people’s time and attention, and it’s just not realistic to assume that everyone will prioritize it.
When you call someone lazy Jon you’re belittling them. You do know the definition of the word, don’t you?
I’m acknowledging the reality of the human condition. Everyone prefers to conserve effort. It’s not a value judgment. It’s natural for human beings to discount the future in weighing whether things are worth the effort.
Ok, you don’t know the definition. Here it is from the Oxford Dictionary:
Unwilling to work or use energy: “He was too lazy to cook.”
Characterized by lack of effort or activity; Showing a lack of effort or care.
You’re not acknowledging shit, you belittled people, got caught and now are backtracking trying to cover yourself.
Big boy pants Jon. Get a pair. And stop belittling people who are working their asses off to survive the Obama economy.
I think the human tendency to conserve effort is a great spur to productivity-enhancing invention. It would actually be a huge waste of time if everybody spent all that time sifting through their garbage. Whenever technology can eliminate time wasted we should embrace it.
Then retract your accusation that people are too lazy to recycle.
I think the other benefit is for recycling quality control. If a person could invent a method to reliably separate garbage, presumably recycling companies wouldn’t have to contend with lots lost due to material cross-contamination?