LEESBURG, Va. -- The thought that J. Winston Porter does not recycle his household plastic might seem blasphemous for the man whose legacy is staked to curbside recycling. Even the act of using a foam coffee cup, which he sips from at this moment, appears odd, but no more so than his ambivalence toward its disposal.
Will he recycle it?
"Only if it's convenient," he says without embarrassment or apology.
But the most curious revelation from this former Environmental Protection Agency official, the brain behind a 1988 EPA effort to jump-start America's recycling movement, is this: The disposable cup in his grip is probably friendlier toward the environment than the reusable porcelain mug that gets washed and rinsed over and over.
"Hot soapy water is a form of pollution, and you have to generate the energy somewhere," he says.
Since 1987, when a New York garbage barge drew the attention of the news media as it foundered in the Atlantic with nowhere to dock, some experts say America's so-called trash crisis has been mixed with rubbish. Most pronounced has been the belief that the nation is running out of landfill space. Even Porter, who less than a year after the barge incident told a concerned nation that it could and should ratchet up its recycling rate, admits to being initially fooled.
"I probably bought into it more than I should have," he says. "It turned out we didn't have a landfill crisis, except in the sense that we are not going to be building many more in New York and New Jersey. Land there is very expensive and it is spoken for."
Recycling boom levels off
By most accounts, it is good that the nation today is recycling 28% of its municipal solid waste, up from the 10% it was recycling when Porter rallied the nation. According to recycling statistics to be published this summer by the EPA, the USA converted 64 million tons of its 230 million tons of trash in 1999 (the most recent EPA data analyzed) into compost, glass bottles, newsprint, aluminum cans and the like.
The EPA aims for a 35% solid waste recycling rate by 2005, but says 32% is more realistic. What began as a boom in the late 1980s has leveled off, now that curbside recycling boxes are nearly as common as flower boxes and the easy stuff -- newspapers, cans, milk jugs -- already are being pruned from the garbage.
"America goes through fits and starts with this," says Jerry Taylor, director of natural resource studies for Washington's Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank. "Recycling was a religion that came and went. People still do it and feel a sense of personal worth for it, but as an issue of transcendent statement of environmental virtue, I don't think it is as important as it used to be."
The 35% goal is about the best America can -- or should -- aspire to, says Steven Levy, an environmental engineer for the EPA's Office of Solid Waste. "Once you go beyond the 35%, the amount of physical labor, transportation, separation and cleaning gets to be too costly," he says.
Yet many states are far more ambitious. Fourteen have goals of 50% or more, including Rhode Island (70%) and New Jersey (65%). Some environmental groups, such as the GrassRoots Recycling Network based in Georgia, advocate "zero waste," a thorough redefining of the term trash.
"For a lot of environmentalists, the manufacturing of stuff is a problematic thing, but recycling is just manufacturing in reverse," Taylor says. "Instead of taking the constituent parts and manufacturing them to produce a widget, you are breaking them up to produce a widget -- and oftentimes it is just as energy intense as the original process."
Hence the destiny of Porter's foam coffee cup, which, when it's buried in a "safe landfill" -- a redundancy with today's strict EPA regulations -- is relatively benign, he says. The fact that polystyrene foam products do not easily biodegrade is all the better. If the leaching of a landfill does occur, the coffee cup will stay put.
"If this foam cup . . . sits in a landfill peacefully, it is not going to kill anybody," Porter says.
GrassRoots Recycling Network co-founder Bill Sheehan believes today's "safe landfill" is tomorrow's headache. No matter how safe the synthetic liners, groundwater monitoring systems, leachate collection and methane control, landfills will be somebody's problem.
"They will leak, eventually. It may be decades or, as some people say, centuries, but just because we won't have to deal with it doesn't mean our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren won't," says Sheehan, who argues that recycling is no more expensive than building landfills and using virgin materials. "If progressive communities sat around listening to dinosaurs like Winston Porter, places like San Francisco wouldn't have a 46% recycling rate."
Focus on other environmental problems
Porter long ago quit trucking (a green Ford Ranger with George W. Bush bumper sticker) his milk jugs 20 miles round-trip to a recycling center in Lovettsville, Va. The two or three pounds of plastic did not justify the gas emissions.
"I am not against recycling at all. I am against crazy recycling," says Porter, 63, founder and president of the Waste Policy Center, an environmental consulting firm here. "I'm not trying to ruin the tooth fairy here or anything, but, truth is, recycling involves some processes and some transportation and it creates some pollution."
That infamous Long Island barge named Mobro, which started it all, was more about a bungled business venture than the burden of trash, but it became an icon for America's disposable culture. Whether perception or reality, this was probably a good thing, Porter says. What began as an environmental movement morphed into a political one, and federal regulations today have made landfills safer and more remote than ever.
Also, in the years immediately following the Mobro, curbside recycling grew from a few hundred programs nationwide to more than 7,000, reaching about 50% of the population.
That is all good and needed, Porter says, but now let's focus on other environmental problems.
"I'm more concerned, for example, about the water and sewer lines in the big cities, some of which are 100 years old. If you get some cross-connection or leakage between sewer lines and water lines, you've got a real problem on your hands," he says. "If I had some extra money, I don't think I'd necessarily spend it on going from 28% recycling to 38% or 48%. I would say let's look at another environmental problem, such as infrastructure."
And with that, he threw his cup in the trash.
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