If you want to be unique and hip, you should stay up-to-date with the waste management industry. It’s very important since it handles almost everything that you’ve already used, and underrated because it’s trash. Think about it – your friends are keeping up with Cardi B and iPhones because they’re shiny and cool, but only true visionaries would see the household waste – cast aside and banished from the American home – and make it their favorite Instagram hashtag. This blog is a great way to keep up with those offbeat garbage trends, because this is a blog about garbage.

Of course, I’m not here just to talk trash – I’m going to do it in a trendy way that acknowledges the urgency of climate change and pollution, and focuses on recycling and reuse. In case you were worried that this is a blog for green thumb conformists, note that I will lambast the recycling status quo on several occasions. So rest assured that your recycling and waste management knowledge will be more hipster and fresh than your friends who read the occasional waste-related article on CNN. But hurry up and read now, and read it first before your friends do, because I will be outlining a plan for global domination waste management for the future. There are already several other hip people throwing around similar plans, so if you miss this train (as in, my blog), it might just become common knowledge while you’re not looking, and your conformist friends might pick this up on CNN before you find out. And that would be very un-hipster of you.

Any waste industry pundit worth their weight in kidney beans will tell you that the biggest waste-related news story of the decade is China. They’re not wrong. (Many of them know more than I do, in fact.) If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s fairly simple. Americans try to recycle a lot. Our recycling is so dirty, though, that getting materials that are clean enough to actually process into new materials is too expensive. So, for a few decades now, we’ve been shipping our half-cleaned recyclables to China. In theory, they’ve been processing our garbage (and I’ll call it garbage, because until it’s actually recyclable, it’s garbage) and turning it into materials for making the cheap products we all know and love and can order on Amazon. (I promise I’ll put up a post later that focuses on these events in more detail, and I’ll even throw in some numbers if you’re good.)

However, it turns out that our “recyclables” are actually too dirty for anyone to effectively sort, not to mention that the people of China (largest population in the world) generate a formidable heap of trash themselves. So, in 2013, China announced a program called Green Fence in which they began to intensely inspect the quality of recyclable from the US (and other Western countries). By 2017, they officially concluded that our trash was too dirty to recycle, and announced a policy called National Sword which, starting 2018, outright banned any so-called recyclables that didn’t meet certain standards of cleanliness. (I’ll describe more exactly what I mean by “cleanliness” of recyclables in a future post, as well, but for now just note that if a former cereal box is covered in spoiled milk from a jug that wasn’t rinsed out, then that cereal box is too dirty to be recycled.)

Most US-originated recyclables didn’t and still don’t meet those cleanliness standards, and so havoc (not total pandemonium, but more havoc than people who deal with trash deserve) broke loose. We (or garbage smugglers who we indirectly paid to take our trash) started sending our recyclables to other places in Asia, like Malaysia or the Philippines. Those small countries (small relative to China) have been quickly overwhelmed to the point that they’ve already started making plans to banish trash imports themselves. Some recyclers in the U.S. have started stockpiling the semi-sorted recycling, in hopes that a new country will be sucker enough to start taking the garbage; others have buckled down to a certain degree, investing in new technology to sort the recyclables better or banning certain hard-to-recycle materials from recycling bins.

So far, these are the main solutions that we have:

• Waste services spend more money to clean our garbage, cutting deeper into city budgets or charging higher pickup prices, depending on who the waste services charge
• We start putting things more things in the trash, particularly those that are too expensive to clean and recycle
• We start paying Asian nations a lot more to take our trash

All of these solutions have obvious downsides, but they’re the best short-term solutions we have. Some would say they’re also long-term solutions, especially the first one, since we’ve grown accustomed to exponential technological progress. I do hope that recyclable sorting technologies (a post on that coming up, too!) continue to get better and cheaper. However, if that’s our only long-term solution, then we’re playing a losing game. This is only one side of the coin.

The other side of the coin is even more obvious, but much harder to do than to say: less garbage. We focus so much on recycling because that’s the only way to responsibly deal with most of the waste as we know it today, or maybe because AI sorting technology sounds sexy. But there are 2 other ways to “close the loop”, as our extinction-wary dinosaur friends would say: Reduce and Reuse. Many of your tree-hugging friends already have a good handle on reducing and reusing, limiting years of waste to just what can fit in a jar or grocery shopping with reusable bags. Reusing in particular, though, is the key to it all. We can do more reusing. A lot more. How can we, you ask? You may have noticed that, earlier in this paragraph, I referenced waste “as we know it today”. Reusing is the key, but your friendly 7-Eleven KeyMe key-making machine is nothing less than a total redesign of waste (more accurately the things that become waste) as we know it.

If you want in on this, come back next week. I’ll try to make the post shorter – no promises – but I can promise there will be pictures.