Some of you may have heard this feature from All Things Considered this past Wednesday on the documentary short Redeemed, directed by Matthew O'Neill and Jon Alpert. The film is about 'canners' in NYC, who try to survive by collecting beverage bottles (aluminum cans, plastic bottles) from others' trash and redeeming them for cash. As you can see from the clips of the canners laden with filled plastic bags, there's no lack of cans or bottles for the rescuing from the landfill.
Of course, the whole premise behind the canners doing what they do is that Americans indiscriminately throw out enough aluminum cans and plastic bottles that digging through NYC's trash worth the canners' time and effort. In doing this, besides the obvious selfish motivation of survival, the canners are doing a bit of a public service, if in a discomfiting way.....
First, for your YT-watching pleasure, here's a video via the Motion Picture Academy's site of the directors talking about their movie, and their reaction to being nominated for best documentary short for the year:
Separately, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez have an interview with O'Neill and Alpert on Democracy Now! as follows:
Being a loser, 3CM hasn't actually seen the film, so he can't comment on it. But the whole point here is about the recycling of the aluminum cans and plastic bottles, of course, and getting them out of the waste stream and saving them from the landfill. You've all probably seen the various factoids about what good it does to recycle. One factoid source is via this link from the EPA, which mentions in part:
"Aluminum
• Recycling aluminum uses less than five percent of the energy used to make the original product.
• Recycling one aluminum beverage can saves enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for three hours, or a TV for two hours.
• Recycling 10 tons of aluminum saves as much greenhouse gas emissions as preserving more than 1.1 acres of forest from deforestation.
Plastic
• Producing new plastic from recycled material uses only two-thirds of the energy required to manufacture it from raw materials.
• Plastics require 100 to 400 years to break down in a landfill.
• Five 2-liter recycled PET bottles produce enough fiberfill to make a ski jacket.
• The energy saved by recycling one plastic bottle will power a computer for 25 minutes.
• Recycling 10 tons of PET plastic saves as much greenhouse gas emissions as removing more than three cars from the road for one year.
This site from the UK personalizes (OK, personalises) how much good recycling can do, with other factoids:
Aluminum (or aluminium, as the Brits term it):
"• If all cans in the UK were recycled, we would need 14 million fewer dustbins.
• £36,000,000 worth of aluminium is thrown away each year.
• Aluminium cans can be recycled and ready to use in just 6 weeks."
Glass:
"Glass that is thrown away and ends up in landfills will never decompose."
Plastic:
"• Most families throw away about 40kg of plastic per year, which could otherwise be recycled.
• The use of plastic in Western Europe is growing about 4% each year.
I found
this article by Eleanor J. Bader in
The Brooklyn Rail that gives an idea of how much NYC's ~10,000 canners pull out of the trash stream. The estimate comes from the recyclables deposited at the
Sure We Can redemption center in Bushwick, according to Ana Martinez de Luco, a Catholic nun:
"'The three hundred or so canners who are part of Sure We Can bring in about 500,000 pieces a month. That’s 20 big truck loads of recyclables.'
Statistics compiled by the state Department of Environmental Conservation confirm de Luco's observation: Between 1982 and 2008, 90 billion containers were recycled, saving more than 52 million barrels of oil and eliminating 200,000 tons of greenhouse gases."
I'll admit that I cringe every time I see someone casually tossing out an aluminum can or plastic bottle, at work or wherever. Of course, I can't really reach into the trash can to pull those recyclables out, at least not in full view of others. And even when I do wait for the coast to be clear, it does feel weird to reach in, and I do wonder whether it really is worth it.
Of course, as the stats above note, it is worth it to pull as much out of the waste stream as possible. But it's also not enough, as the extreme weather events of the past year or so illustrate, i.e. we're still eating the planet too fast for our own good.
On a somewhat snarky closing note, one could wonder: if all of us really recycled everything that we possibly could and reduced the presence of aluminum cans and plastic bottles to nothing, what would the canners do to survive? Not that this is really going to happen, since human beings aren't that efficient or "pure" when it comes to recycling, even me.
BTW, you can see that this is another autobot posting. I have no idea if or when I'll be able to reply to any comments tonight. Tomorrow may have to do, so we'll see. With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week.....