How to 'Recycle Everything'—Do Nothing

Every year, Earth Day reminds us all that we can and must do more to preserve our planet. Hopefully, it inspires us to be more conscientious about using eco-friendly products and recycling our trash. However, as with New Year’s resolutions, most of us fall back rather quickly into our bad habits. 

Because we are too busy, lazy, or apathetic, we soon forget to segregate that wine bottle or piece of plastic from our garbage, and the big blue bin outside our apartment or home goes empty. 

In fact, if you look in most trash cans around town, there are plenty of recyclables in them. The scavengers who dig through our dumpsters know this—and so do the statistics, which show that West Hollywood has one of the lowest recycling rates in Los Angeles County.

We are not alone in this predicament. Our much larger neighbor, Los Angeles, also made the decision to put the burden on residents to determine what gets recycled and what goes to the landfill, and the results have been similarly unimpressive. 

Waiting for a plane in Frankfurt Airport in February, I watched a fellow traveler try to dispose of her water bottle before boarding our flight to San Francisco. Before her were four color-coded options, labeled in German. I don’t speak German well enough to tell you what they said, but I could surmise from the contents of the bin which one she needed to choose and pointed her to the right receptacle. 

Had she held onto her bottle for 12 hours, a simple waste bin in San Francisco Airport would have told her, “All contents separated off-site.” The bin at San Francisco Airport is not a trash can, but a recycling bin in which we dispose of everything, and let the professionals sort out what is recyclable and what is not.

This is not a radical new idea. Not only is San Francisco doing it, but West Hollywood businesses are participating as well. We residents need only to look at the coffee shop around the corner or the boutique down the block to see 100 percent recycling in action. 

Unlike residences, West Hollywood businesses do not have blue recycle bins. Their employees do not have to separate recyclables from other trash, and they do not have to rely on multiple pick-ups by big, lumbering trash trucks to haul away all of their garbage.

West Hollywood businesses just throw everything into the same bin. A single truck picks up the bin and carts it to a “materials recycling facility” where the trash is dumped on a conveyer belt and sorted by employees trained to spot and segregate recyclables.

However, like Los Angeles, West Hollywood, still requires “source separation,” an incredibly inefficient relic of the past, for recyclables in its residential units. That means you and I have to decide what materials get a second lease on life and which get sent to the landfill. 

Imagine if we did away with source separation for residential waste in West Hollywood? Not only would it make people’s lives easier, but it would capture more recyclable items. Is that olive oil bottle contaminated because it was exposed to food waste? Just toss it in the bin and let the professionals decide. Recycling everything is that easy.

This simple solution also is the name of the netroots movement I am starting up called RECYCLE EVERYTHING. Revolutionize the way you think about trash, and consider that everything can and should be salvageable. Not convinced? Check out the Recycle Everything twitter feed and take a look in the trash cans of our city.

Bottles and cans get dumped next to newspapers and plastic containers—and all of it goes to landfills. Take a look in your own trash can and ask yourself why you don’t get rid of it and start recycling everything. 

One hundred percent recycling is both simple and possible. It will make people’s lives easier, take unnecessary garbage trucks off the streets, and create jobs at the recycling facilities. 

RECYCLE EVERYTHING was founded by Scott Schmidt, a community organizer and West Hollywood Transportation Commissioner, in response to issues that came up during his in March 2011.