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As a curious child, I would frequently investigate the scene of my mother’s post-dinner kitchen. Amongst dropped food crumbs, splattered sauces, and pans of leftovers, I frequently discover emptied food containers soaking in dishwater. And for as far back as my memory allows me to recall, there was always a large cardboard box sitting on the floor of our kitchen for temporary storage of said recyclable food containers once the saturated label was removed and the contents cleaned out. “Plastic, glass, and aluminum go in there. Everything else in the trash,” I was always instructed. And that’s just the way it was.
That is, until I started going to my friends’ houses to play and for sleepovers. “Where do you put your cans?” I would ask my peers, only to be met with blank stares- as if I was a fool for even asking. My mother was soon faced with the difficult task of explaining why we recycle, even though it requires extra work and we aren’t required to do it. Once I understood that a lot of everyday materials could be broken down and processed into new raw materials, I understood the importance of the work. I remember the day she pointed to a landfill and reminded me that anything we don’t recycle goes into that pit; it was a freighting realization to finally recognize my contributions to something so awful.
Fast forward to my post-college lifestyle, more than 20 years later, and we find my kitchen in similar fashion as the one I grew up in: a large box for kitchen recyclables and another for paper waste. As a single-person household, the boxes only require emptying a couple times per month. Effort to load them into my car is minimal, and I usually drop them off on my way to somewhere else. The process is still the same, labor is still nominal, and advances in service offerings can even remove your recyclables directly from your own curb. And yet, there are still thousands of irresponsible consumers, just like my childhood cohorts, who refuse to take part in this effective greening activity.
So I wonder- how has such a simple and leisurely chore become so uncommon and rare? It seems that with the surge of attention given to products and practices that are environmentally friendly, more and more consumers would be recycling. It pains me to see a tin can in the trash at work and I scold guests in my home for putting a beer bottle in my garbage can. Yet, when I mention my recycling habits, I am still met with blank stares and those who don’t recycle openly laugh at my disgust with their bad habits.
As such, I have come to believe that teaching children to recycle must be done before they have the opportunity to develop any other kind of habit. Show them from a young age that washing and sorting recyclables are a regular part of your house cleaning ritual. But, most importantly, help them understand why they are washing and sorting. If the positive effects of recycling are implanted early on, they will not only behave with those morals throughout the course of their life, but also encourage their peers to do the same.
