Solid waste management practices and their meanings in ecologically conscious households

Abstract

This paper describes the household waste management practices of self-described sustainable households, focusing on the intentional actions the members of these households take to reduce environmental harm. Data from qualitative interviews about household waste management practices related to the disposal of trash, “packaging”, and recycling are analyzed using a Marxist-feminist model of household production. For the households in this study, packaging is a powerful reminder of their collusion with capital, eliciting powerful and unexpected negative reactions in interviews. At the same time, practices that involve allowing organic matter to decompose in the backyard, leaving urine unflushed, or placing human feces in the clothes washing machine or bathtub elicited few negative reactions, and recycling made people feel happy. Packaging and waste are necessary in capitalism because of the spatial division of labor and production, part of the constitutive contradiction between social needs and private production. I show how a division of labor and production that is necessary for accumulation manifests itself in an inherent antagonism toward human well-being in a discussion of the exhaustion, frustration, and conflict generated for highly ecologically oriented parents who are just trying to do their best to live a sustainable life in capitalist society despite the limits to the efficacy of these efforts.

Keywords

Accumulation eco-Marxism environmental sustainability feminist political economy waste

Introduction

This paper describes the household waste management habits and practices of 23 self-described sustainable households¹ with school-aged children in Portland, Oregon, based on qualitative interviews with 37 adult members of these households. The discussion here focuses on the intentional actions the members of these households take to reduce environmental harm in the realm of solid waste, as household members attempt to “undo” the perceived impacts of their day-to-day lives on the environment. The household waste management practices surrounding the disposal of trash, “packaging,” and recycling will be analyzed using a Marxist-feminist model of household production in capitalist society.

The most striking and surprising result of these interviews was the emotional intensity of my informants when they discussed household solid waste. They are trying to do their best to live healthy, happy lives while taking “personal responsibility” for their impact on the natural environment. However, the many competing priorities faced by working parents of young children mean they are frequently exhausted, even before the many chores involved in leading an eco-conscious lifestyle are added in. I infer that my respondents feel terrible because they are living in a society that is not designed to promote their well-being—in fact it is antagonistic toward both human and environmental flourishing. This antagonism inherent in capitalism can be understood through an examination of household solid waste processing—part of the routinized, easily overlooked activities that constitute day-to-day life.

The eco-conscious households I spoke with were almost universally concerned with reducing their consumption, and for many, the solid waste generated in the course of their day-to-day lives serves as an uncomfortable reminder of their shortcomings in the sustainability realm and the impossibility of a truly environmentally friendly lifestyle in capitalism. For some households, practices that prevented waste from going to a landfill, such as composting or recycling, produce positive feelings and are sufficient to alleviate the guilt associated with waste-generating consumption. Other households attempt to reduce their consumption generally or to purchase items with as little packaging as possible because recycling and composting are not enough for them to feel absolved of the guilt they experience as part of their environmentally destructive collusion with capital.

In the “Methods and sample” section of this paper, I will describe the methods used to arrive at the final sample of households and the qualitative interviewing carried out with the final sample. In the “Theory” section, I will outline the theory used to analyze the ethnographic data in two parts: first, a theory of household production, and second a theory of household solid waste in capitalism. I will argue that packaging and household solid waste are necessary in capitalism because of the spatial division of labor and production necessitated by the imperatives of accumulation. The unwaged work of household solid waste disposal can likewise be thought of as a necessity of capitalist accumulation—a way in which the endless imperative of accumulation creates a contradiction between private production and social needs. In the “Results” section, I will provide the results from my qualitative interviews with eco-conscious households about their day-to-day practices related to trash, packaging, and recycling. Here, I will describe how environmentally conscious adults experience the contradiction between the imperatives of accumulation and human flourishing through their day-to-day management of household solid waste. In the final section, I will argue that my ethnographic results provide evidence that that a division of labor and production that is necessary for accumulation manifests itself in an inherent antagonism toward human well-being. My informants are exhausted, frustrated, and experiencing inter-personal conflict generated by the ways the imperative of accumulation shapes their day-to-day lives and management of household solid waste—including what waste is generated in the first place. These highly ecologically oriented parents are well-meaning people who are just trying to do their best to live a sustainable life despite an awareness of the limits to the efficacy of their efforts.

Methods and sample

This research is based on 60–90 minute long qualitative interviews with 37 adults in 23 households in the Northwestern United States conducted in April 2017. Data from these interviews were analyzed thematically. The sampling frame for this study was adults in households in the greater Portland–Beaverton–Vancouver Metro area with children under age 10 who consider their lifestyles eco-conscious or sustainable. My choice to include only families with children under 10 is not an arbitrary one—this allows me to see how households balance sustainability and other priorities at a point in the lifecycle where resources like time and money are particularly constrained. The Portland Metro Area is an ideal place to recruit highly eco-conscious households. The proportion of adults who report being worried about climate change in Multnomah County ranks in the highest 0.01% among U.S. Counties at 66% (Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 2015). Portland, Oregon, residents routinely rank among the “greenest” in the United States thanks to high rates of non-car transport, renewable energy, and recycling (Bernardo, 2016; Rogers, 2011; Svoboda et al., 2008). Thus, this is a useful setting for investigating the practices—and their consequences—of households who see themselves as particularly sustainable or eco-friendly and find themselves in a location where the local and regional government, infrastructures, businesses, and other community members make these pro-environmental practices as easy as possible.

The final sample includes a great deal of diversity in socio-economic status, household structure, race and ethnicity, gender identity, sexual identity, and priorities and motivations in the sustainability realm. Households included same-sex, opposite sex, and gender non-conforming parent-headed nuclear families; single parents; blended families; people living with roommates and grandparents; intentional multi-family households; and people living in a cohousing community.

While I had initially expected to find mostly white nuclear families with relatively high incomes, my sample of households told a different story. I found that sustainability is not exclusively the domain of the white and affluent. Low-income households typically substituted time-consuming sustainability practices for more costly ones, and tended to live in ways that involved a lower overall environmental impact than many of their higher-income counterparts in my sample. Low-income households I spoke with lived in smaller dwellings, owned fewer or no cars, and generally consumed less overall—in part out of financial necessity and in part for environmental reasons. The popular conception of a sustainable household might be an affluent white nuclear family installing solar panels on their single family home and picking up organic meat in their new hybrid vehicle from an over-priced natural foods store. Is my informant Fiona—a single mother who works part-time at a daycare and lives in a small rental apartment with no car, no space cooling equipment, and no central heating who shops for vegetarian groceries on the bus and obtains most of what her household needs either free or purchased second-hand—more or less environmentally conscious than an affluent family with a Prius and solar panels? Perhaps it is easier to be “sustainable” when you don’t have money to buy many things in the first place.

To learn from my informants, I first had to attempt to assume a “conscious attitude of almost complete ignorance” (Spradley, 1979: 4) of the world of pro-environmental practices and sustainability-oriented families. I frequently encountered confused and disturbed looks from the people I was interviewing when I asked them questions like, “Why do you recycle?”. I followed up these questions by asking the informants to pretend that I’m from outer space and that I want them to explain normal, seemingly obvious things to me. It wasn’t that I was some kind of monster who didn’t share their fundamental concern for the environment, a conclusion my informants would draw about someone who is opposed to recycling or doesn’t understand its appeal, but that I wanted to understand their perspective in their own words. I asked my informants to suspend disbelief and to assume I didn’t know anything.

While ethnography and field research can frequently mean sustained periods of participant observation lasting months or even years, the qualitative or ethnographic interview is a method that allows the researcher to make inferences based on what informants say about their beliefs, practices, and artifacts during a shorter study period. These interviews are a useful way to study sustainability practices and their meanings in households because “notions of materialism, belief, perception, and values are at the core of the sustainability vision” (Murphy and McDonagh, 2016: xiv). The semi-structured qualitative interview format allowed my informants to teach me the meanings and consequences of their practices and to guide me to understand what they deem to be important in the environmental realm, without demanding too much of their already constrained time and energy.

Interviews focused on the routinized and easily overlooked day-to-day practices of household members as they go about meeting their collective needs in day-to-day life. Practices related to household waste were just one of many topics covered in the interviews. The topic was introduced to informants by asking them the following questions: “What are the ways you deal with household waste (trash, recycling, compost, diapers)? Is this something you did growing up? How did you learn this practice?”. I asked my informants follow-up questions to help me understand how they developed their current practices, what resources are employed in the production of these practices, what these practices mean to my informants, what their motivations for these practices are, and what they might do differently if they had more time or money.

Theory

I was struck over the course of my interviews by how exhausted my informants were. A concern about lack of time was expressed in almost every conversation with informants for this study. Families find it difficult to cope with the burdens of their paid jobs, the unpaid work of day-to-day life as a parent of young children, and the frequently time-consuming sustainability practices they’ve undertaken. Even stay-at-home mothers felt pressed for time as they juggled the many obligations of an intensive and professionalized mothering métier. An editorial from over 60 years ago rings true today:

When millions of workers are expressing the same gripe about their job …, it is no longer a gripe, it becomes a social problem. That gripe or grievance no longer affects just this or that individual, it affects all of society. (“Gripes and Grievances,” 1955: 4)

My informants told me that they often feel tired and depleted, and that they struggle to maintain their physical and emotional well-being. They take on sustainability practices that frequently seek to address and undo problems created at other sites and scales, such as problems related to the production, packaging, and distribution of goods. They make trade-offs in order to cope with life’s demands, but they are not happy about having to make these compromises. There is simply not enough time in the day to get everything done.

Robbins ([1932] 2007: 15) writes that “the economist studies the disposal of scarce means.” However, a full understanding of social conditions requires also understanding the underlying sources of this scarcity. Robbins is of course correct in pointing out that “There are only twenty-four hours in the day. We have to choose between the different uses to which they may be put” (14). But both external constraints and those that may appear to be self-imposed place real limits on my informants’ choices. The range of options is restricted before the choosing can begin. A Marxist-feminist theoretical model of the role of household production in capitalist society can point to the sources of these constraints and can help to show how a division of labor and production that is necessary for accumulation manifests itself in an inherent antagonism toward human well-being. A theoretical discussion of household solid waste demonstrates how household solid waste and its disposal are likewise shaped by the imperatives of accumulation in capitalism. Taken together, these theories can help explain why practices surrounding household solid waste disposal and sorting are so fraught for my informants.

Household production

The household in capitalism is an economic unit that engages in activities related to production, consumption, and distribution. Households in capitalism are compelled to purchase commodities from retail stores because waged workers in capitalism produce things that they don’t want in order to acquire money they must use to buy the things they do want in the market—this is part of the spatial division of labor between “work” and “home” in capitalism. And households in capitalism are compelled to engage in activities related to household production because commodities in the store have not yet been transformed into the final end-use goods and services desired by household members (Reid, 1934). Inputs purchased from the market must be transformed into usable final end use goods and services by combining market purchases with the unwaged time of household members via a household production process (Munro, 2019). “The reproduction of labor in capitalist societies requires that the products and services produced with a view to profit be gathered and transformed so that they may meet socially determined needs” (Weinbaum and Bridges, 1976: 96). Thus, the unwaged work of household consumption—by which I mean gathering supplies—is a subset of the larger process of household production. Market purchases by household members represent the derived demand for goods and services that are produced with these commodities within the household, such as meals, cleanliness, physical comfort, other socially determined end uses enjoyed by household members.

But something must be done with the materials that are no longer wanted or needed by the household after all of this production and consumption has taken place. Households in capitalism do not have “much choice in what materials they buy and thus turn into surplus stuff” (Gille, 2010: 1050), that is, waste. How households go about the processing of their solid waste does not occur at random, rather it is “structured by capital and the state” (Weinbaum and Bridges, 1976: 96). Local and regional governments compel or constrain the ability of household members to dispose of waste as they please, partnering with private industry for waste disposal services. For example, recycling can be thought of as the state-directed separation by households of valuable from undesirable waste. Backyard burning of solid wastes is restricted in many jurisdictions (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2016). Some jurisdictions restrict or regulate backyard composting of yard and food waste, while others require that these materials enter the municipal waste stream. Households can be fined by their local government for sorting recycling incorrectly, placing recyclable materials into landfill-bound trash, and other non-compliance with local rules for household solid waste sorting and management.

To summarize, the household production process in capitalism can thus be conceived of as four distinct phases: first, household members carry out unwaged consumption work to gather materials for use in household production; second, household members carry out unwaged work to transform these materials into end-use goods and services; third, household members enjoy the end-use goods and services; fourth, household members carry out unwaged work to discard waste materials that are harmful or no longer useful for household production. This paper investigates the final phase of these household consumption and production processes. For my eco-conscious informants, practices involving household waste are both some of the first things they think of when they think about their pro-environmental activities. At the same time, these practices are frequently a reminder of the environmentally damaging consumption they wish they could avoid.

Household solid waste

Some amount of leftover materials that are no longer deemed useful—even after substantial repurposing and salvage—is not unique to capitalism. Even the earliest humans discarded things seen as no longer having use-value. What is unique to capitalism is a spatial division of labor and production, and the way in which physical objects can move between having exchange-value and being “waste” based on their ability—at a given moment—to be exchanged for money in the market.

Weinbaum and Bridges (1976) write that “capitalist accumulation creates its own necessities,” resulting in contradictions between social needs and the imperatives of accumulation. Capitalist firms attempt to endlessly produce commodities for the sake of realizing surplus-value rather than producing things as use-values to meet the needs of people. While commodities must also have use-values, they are not produced to “satisfy directly the needs of the producer, and [are] worth nothing to the producer as a use-value” (Clarke, 1991: 86). What differentiates a commodity from waste is not inherent to the physical properties or use-value of the object. From the perspective of the capitalist firm, an object is a commodity if it can be exchanged for money to realize surplus-value. This is not a permanent condition, as some items and materials may have value in one period or context, but may not be exchangeable for money to realize surplus-value in others. An extreme example of this is the devaluation of commodities that occurs “in the event of a crisis of overproduction, in which the commodity becomes worthless … and may be discarded or destroyed” (Clarke, 1991: 86). To understand household solid waste in capitalism, we must first understand that waste is not produced either by households or by capitalist firms. Instead, solid waste—that is, material objects that have no exchange-value—is ultimately produced by the imperatives of accumulation that compel and constrain human activities in capitalism.

Household solid waste—how much of it there is and how it is disposed of—is shaped by the imperatives of accumulation in capitalism. Household solid waste may be recycled, incinerated, or landfilled. It includes spoiled food and food scraps, broken or outdated non-durable items like toys and electronics, soiled diapers, clothing, paper towels and tissues, newspapers, disposable dinnerware, and books, magazines, newspapers, and mail. Packaging is a special category of household solid waste that includes single-use beverage containers, food jars and cans, take-out restaurant food containers, corrugated cardboard boxes and paperboard, bags and sacks, foil and closures, wrapping papers, and plastic wrap and films (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2018). Packaging has particular relevance for understanding household solid waste in capitalism. Packaging is the things—whether recyclable or not—that surround the products purchased in the market to protect them for transportation and distribution. The unwaged work of packaging disposal can be thought of as a necessity of capitalist accumulation—a way in which the endless imperative of accumulation creates a contradiction between private production for profit and social needs. It is the job of households, constrained by local regulations and the availability of services, to figure out what to do with all of this waste.

Results

Trash

My informants think about trash in ways that are linked to the anti-littering public service announcement campaigns and images of swelling landfills of their childhoods (Cialdini, 2001; Shabecoff, 1987).

Ian: I remember in junior high them telling us not to trash the environment. And they had someone come to school in a costume dressed as a trash heap to teach us about the environment.

Owen: Growing up in the Midwest in the 1970s, people didn’t talk about recycling or the environment. Our consideration of the environment was the TV commercial with a Native American guy crying because a white guy threw a beer can out the window. “Don’t Litter” was it. There just wasn’t a movement going on where I lived.

Tim: When I was a kid, the crying Indian ad was really big. And I remember there was a joke at the end of a Steve Martin record, where he says, “You know, it’s really important if you can keep a litter bag in your car. It doesn’t take up too much space. And when it’s full you can throw the whole littler bag out the window.” That’s how he ended his whole set! That is so of that moment. That was the whole point of the crying Indian ad. Have a litter bag in your car instead of throwing it out the window.

Eric: For whatever reason, whenever I think of sustainability, or when I first realized that I had some kind of impact, was cutting the six-pack rings. Seeing a picture of one around a bird’s neck, and realizing that I should cut all of those up. That was something that someone suggested to me, and so I was adamant that we should do that. And I would cut them into the smallest pieces in the world.

Trash is an evocative symbol of human impacts on the natural environment. The image of an Italian-American dressed up as a Native American shedding a tear over litter and pollution (Aleiss, 1999) stuck in the minds of some of my informants who were children in the mid-1970s, even if they cite the Keep America Beautiful public service announcement campaign—produced by front groups for the bottled beverage industry (Andersen, 2013: 407; Strand, 2008)—with a chuckle and an eye roll. For my informants, childhood messages from the state or public service ad campaigns about the correct processing of household waste made a lasting impression. Consumers needed to be trained not to throw packaging on the ground by the packaging industry itself, convincing people to take on the work of proper disposal of materials that exist in the first place to allow for the sale of profitable single-use items.

In 2011, the city of Portland, Oregon, switched from weekly to every-other-week trash pickup with weekly recycling pickup, justifying this change by allowing residents to begin putting food scraps into the yard waste bins (Sarasohn, 2011). While this took some getting used to for some households, the response among my informants to this local government policy was positive.

Amy: I think a good aspect of Portland is that there are a lot of monetary incentives for being more environmentally conscious, which I think will help motivate people who may not be leaning towards it just for the sake of doing it. But just making it easier with the trash situation, making it more expensive to have more trash pickup or bigger cans. In [Texas] you have this HUGE trash can that gets picked up every week, you get a tiny recycling box that picks up every other week, and there’s no composting. We are finally living someplace that was more in-line with what we wanted, which was the big recycling can and the small trash can.

Andrew: The thing that was so beautiful about it was how symmetric it is. You know, it was literally the exact opposite. In terms of which size different cans are and the frequency of pick up.

Brian: I’m kind of a passive supporter or the way that the city has pushed down trash in relation to recycling. So, making it less frequent pickup, making it smaller containers, trying to push more into the recycling stream… And I’ve got past the point where every other week trash collection was an issue, and if I forget on a particular week [to take out the trash] it’s not a problem. So, my overall level of trash has just continued to decline

They like that the city is encouraging people to recycle and compost through these kinds of rational economic “incentives” and policies that make sending things to the landfill more expensive or more difficult. This policy change reflected my informants’ belief that the city of Portland makes decisions about how to get things done—at least some of the time—that are consistent with the pro-environmental values and priorities of my informants.

When I asked informants about trash in general, only Gloria expressed strong emotions.

Gloria: Throwing stuff away really affects me. I don’t like throwing stuff away. It makes me feel ungracious and greedy and truly guilty. Spoiled! Because I know where it’s going. It’s never actually going away.

However for most of my informants, some quantity of soiled, contaminated, or no longer useful items are a fact of life, and their task is merely to put those items in the correct place for disposal.

“Packaging”

Informants in nearly every household I spoke with brought up the topic of “packaging” without being asked, and I was surprised by the intensity of their negative reaction to packaging. What they mean by packaging is the things—whether recyclable or not—that surround the products they buy to protect them for transportation and distribution. This includes materials like cardboard boxes that online purchases come in, plastic films, plastic bags, and rigid plastic clamshell containers.

Avoiding packaging in items they buy is something that many of the households I spoke with put active effort into.

Brian: I do pretty actively make choices on purchases based on low levels of packaging, low levels of creating a lot of that waste.

Chris: I’m always buying bulk and trying to avoid buying stuff that’s in clamshells or things like that. And then for other items, like if you’re getting sandwich bread we will save the bags and re-use them for other stuff. We use a lot of yogurt containers and things like that for food storage later.

Scott: We’ve been doing Blue Apron [recipe and meal delivery service] for a few months, but I think we are going to stop that because of all the packaging. The food service is a real benefit because it helps us avoid wasting food. I think we’re going to switch to Sun Basket, which is a similar service, but with purely recyclable and compostable packaging. The freezer packs are just water and cotton.

Eric: I think we got Blue Apron [recipe and meal delivery service] for a month or two. It was just way too much packaging. They tout that it is pre-portioned to avoid waste, and everything’s recyclable, and it’s not. Like, no. After like a month or two of that, I was disgusted with it. It is so wasteful. Our situation is not unique. A lot of people are in this situation in terms of how the limited time, and us trying to survive, and sustainability intersect. That’s one of the ways it did. We make a decision in terms of sustainability when we decided to cancel Blue Apron.

Each of these men from upper-middle income households made a choice to substitute away from convenient but more expensive items with packaging they saw as “excessive.” In several cases, they decided to buy less expensive substitutes that take more time to purchase and prepare—turning the notion that being “sustainable” is expensive on its head.

Eric is a person whose wife describes him as “super laid-back and chill.” He has a pleasant, friendly, and go-with-the-flow demeanor, but I could hear genuine anger and frustration in his voice every time he brought up packaging. Eric was able to eliminate this one source of packaging from his household by ending his delivered meal kit service, but it is hard to avoid packaging when buying food and other consumer goods, particularly as a parent.

Amy: It’s hard to spend the extra time and money on making sure you consume less plastic. Everything is in a plastic thing, and then it’s in a box, and then it’s…

Carrie: Toys always have so much packaging and weird plastic parts, and it is harder to come buy stuff like that without a lot of packaging.

Tim: They are feeding kids this constant drip of snacks. Morning snack, afternoon snack, “Where’s my snack?” I’m bummed that it’s a bunch of gummies most of the time, and its wrapper is its own negative impact on the ecosystem. Oil, plastic lining, and a bunch of ink. It’s just silly.

Several informants told me that one of the biggest changes in their habits since becoming a parent is purchasing large quantities of packaged snacks for their children. They feel bad about the packaging associated with feeding their children this way, but for many households, the alternative—making all snack food items for their children from scratch or portioning out foods from a larger container into smaller reusable containers—takes too much time.

Because Eric and Emily both work full time, the household frequently relies on Amazon.com for the convenience and time-savings of having items delivered to their home.

Emily: I always feel a little guilty when I get something from Amazon or something that is egregiously packaged.

She knows this decision is not good for the environment, and feels bad about this compromise in her values for convenience’s sake. Carrie echoes Emily’s experience:

Carrie: I have to be way better about all of the packaging, and I’ve taken to ordering things online, and then I feel bad about packaging.

Kirstin: What drives the decision to order things online?

Carrie: Ease and time constraints.

Guilt over Amazon.com purchases and the associated packaging was a fairly common subject that informants brought up. They feel that packaging is bad for the environment, but they also feel such pressing time constraints that the ease of ordering needed items online is worth the emotional discomfort of dealing with the packaging once the items arrive.

My informant Fiona is a low-income single mother of two who does not own a car and lives in a small apartment without air conditioning. Out of all of Fiona’s actions that she can think of that could be harmful for the environment, she believes that the packaging surrounding the food she buys has the biggest adverse effect.

Fiona: I feel that our biggest negative environmental impact is food packaging, for sure.

Similarly, Rob told me point-blank that he does not like packaging, and Eric says that plastic packaging is the thing that bothers him the most.

Rob: I do not like packaging waste and things of that nature.

Eric: Plastic is probably the thing that gets under my skin more than anything else. Whenever I go to the grocery store, I never put any of the produce in plastic. I just put it in the cart and put it on the belt. I can tell some people are really put off by that.

Packaging is reviled. It is a necessary evil, a cost associated with provisioning that protects purchases from damage and spoilage as they travel to their final destination. Chris and Fiona try to re-use elements of packaging for storage, but in general packaging serves no useful purpose once items arrive.

Recycling

Yvonne is an urban homesteader who makes her own laundry detergent by manually grating bars of castile soap, buys close to nothing new, and runs a permaculture business with her husband. When I asked her about the most important thing pro-environmental thing she does, her answer was immediate: recycling. For many of my informants, recycling provokes an emotional reaction opposite to the one elicited by packaging. People love recycling. The inverse of negative images of litter and landfills and strangulated birds from their childhoods, recycling was associated with powerful memories and positive feelings of making a difference in the world.

Orla: The environment and environmental causes were big from a young age in school. The whole Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. It is now painful to me to not recycle something.

Penny: There are times when I am cleaning out the refrigerator and I’ll find a gross yogurt container or something, and I don’t want to go through the pain to clean it out to recycle it. There are moments for my own sanity when I have to say, “OK in this moment, I need to just not care.”

Recycling is so deeply ingrained for my informants that they experience negative feelings and internal conflict when they are unable to recycle something, either because it is not possible or because doing so would consume too much time in their busy lives.

Recycling is a universal practice in the households I spoke with. In fact, not recycling was considered socially taboo.

Rebecca: Here, everyone recycles. Not recycling is on the same level as spanking here. If someone told me here that they don’t recycle, I’d be like, “What?!? That is antiquated and NOT ok!”

Tara: Everyone recycles in Portland. If someone told me that they don’t recycle, it would be shocking. For me, I think what would be hard about that would be knowing the shame associated with not knowing any better. Maybe they haven’t had anyone who taught them, and then they are feeling judged.

Tara was a particularly reflective person, who tried to put herself into the shoes of someone who hadn’t been taught about recycling and was being socially shamed for not understanding the social conventions around solid waste disposal. Owen compared the practice of recycling in Portland to church-going in his Midwestern hometown.

Owen: I don’t want to throw a ton of stuff in a landfill or be wasteful, but there is also a social norm aspect to recycling.

In his view, recycling is just something you do to signal to everyone in your community that you’re a decent human being.

When my informants talked about recycling, they were generally referring to two things—curbside recycling and bottle return. Curbside recycling involves sorting recyclable items into a separate bin for weekly home pickup by a waste disposal service, while bottle return involves taking certain items, like aluminum cans and glass bottles, to a machine at a grocery store for a return of the deposit paid at the time of purchase. Items with a bottle return deposit can be recycled at the curbside, but doing so forfeits the deposit. Only two of my informants talked to me about participating in bottle return. While Mina is in charge of curbside recycling and nearly all of her household’s sustainability practices, bottle return is her husband Mike’s chore. He views it as a separate activity from recycling, and it is his job to collect aluminum cans and beer bottles and return them to the store for the deposits. Nathan and Nicole employ a personal assistant—they jokingly refer to him as their “butler”—who helps them with various chores in their high-income suburban household for 20 hours a week. Returning cans and bottles is his one of his jobs, though he does not get to keep the money from the deposits.

Every household I spoke with participates in curbside recycling, though they have different levels of investment in recycling rules. Sorting recycling properly takes time and know-how. Many respondents admit that they find it difficult to keep track of which items are recyclable, and that they find the rules occasionally counter-intuitive.

Quinn: It seems like some of the things I’d like to put in the recycling, I’ve found out that they can’t take in the curbside recycling. Plastic strawberry containers are an example of that. You have to take that to a special recycling place.

Kirstin: How do you learn about what can be recycled and not?

Carrie: *laughs*

Chris: It’s such a pain in the neck. I feel like it changes a lot. We get the thing from Metro [regional government] annually, and …

Carrie: There are still certain plastic pieces that I’m never quite sure …

Chris: We used to just keep that thing around, but I feel like we’ve just….

Carrie: Oh, the guide?

Chris: Yeah, the guide. But I feel like we’ve just gotten into a routine about what stuff is recyclable or not. But I know that they’ve increased some things.

Carrie: Yeah, there’s certain plastics that I throw out that probably…

Chris: You know, the plastic lids… that can now go on top of the whatever plastic containers…

Carrie: *laughing* I could use more education on the specific plastic items.

My informants are trying to do their best, but constantly changing recycling rules can be burdensome to keep track of, especially for busy working parents with young children.

Some of the more committed recyclers seek out information and educate themselves on proper recycling, which requires both investing time and knowing where to look to find this information in the first place.

Brian: I learn about what is recyclable from Metro! I actually really pay attention to those things! I hear also the local and national media about how recycling works, and I’ve heard things like the fact that the quality of recycled paper is going down because of mixed stream recycling. So, it really is important for you to keep your food-related crap out of the recycling! So just kind of general news research, and then the local notifications and educational campaigns and that kind of thing. I actively seek out information, but I also actually read the information that’s sent to me! *laughing*

Kirstin: How do you find out about recycling sorting?

Dayna: I tell David how it is, and he tries to disagree with the rules! *laughing* about what’s recyclable and how to sort? I rely on people that I know who are like Master Recyclers and have taught me what is recyclable and we have some folks in our office who have done a great job of educating, and there is always the guide from the city.

While Brian deliberately takes the time to learn recycling rules, Dayna is able to get this information from her job in the sustainability industry. She learns sustainability skills on the job that that are also helpful when she is at home.

Recycling was one of the areas where conflict over differences in knowledge of and commitment to sustainability practices occurred fairly regularly in the households I spoke with. Portland has recycling rules that change over time and that my informants find are not always intuitive. While recycling was a universal practice in the households I spoke with, household members had different levels of compliance with recycling rules even within households. There was often a member of the couple who was the resident “recycling expert,” and who worked to enforce recycling rules in the household. A conversation between Dayna and David about their different opinions on recycling brings this type of conflict into focus:

Dayna: David goes based on the spirit of what he thinks should be recyclable. This is a big, long-term marital thing where David thinks that things he thinks he should be able to recycle at the curbside, if he puts it in the curbside recycling bin, even though it’s not recyclable it’s “sending a message” that they should be taking this thing. And I’m just like, you’re making people’s lives more difficult.

Kirstin: So, David, you’re laughing.

Dayna: Because it’s true!

David: I mean, it’s like… marginally true. I may have used to have done that.

Kirstin: So what is something that you think should be recyclable that you have put in the recycling?

David: Like clamshells, plastic clamshells. Those aren’t supposed to go in the recycling, but I sneak those in there.

Dayna: Mostly it’s plastics, for David. A lot of plastics or to-go containers or wax …

David: Dayna always tells me that the paper boxes that go in the freezer …

Dayna: ARE NOT RECYCLABLE!

David: But they look like they should be recyclable and they have the recycling symbol on them …

Dayna: So David puts them in there anyway! And I’m like NO! You’re not following the rules! The Master Recycler people have been very clear.

David: Even the ones with the little symbol on them? I mean, it looks like they’re recyclable.

Dayna: NO. So …. *laughing*

Quinn describes a similar recycling dynamic in her household. She will also take items that she believes are recyclable out of the trash bin at work and put them into the recycling bin, though she admits that she isn’t always sure of the rules and occasionally learns she is wrong.

Quinn: My husband does consider the environment for sure, but I think I get more anal about certain things like running the heat. If there is an item that as a little bit of plastic but is mostly paper, I’ll rip off the plastic and put the paper in the recycling. My husband isn’t as good about the recycling. I get pretty anal about the recycling.

Nicole sorts through the recycling to correct what she believes to be recycling errors that her husband Nathan has made, and Leonda also picks recyclable items out of the trash that their roommate and husband have discarded.

Some discarded items that can’t be recycled via the curbside system can still be recycled through non-curbside recycling. Some informants, like Ivy and Eric, routinely take items to a local natural foods store that provides recycling bins for items that aren’t accepted through curbside recycling. Penny takes items, including not only packaging but also broken plastic toys, to a local for-profit recycling center that accepts some items that can’t be recycled at the curbside. Several other households wish they could practice non-curbside recycling, but they don’t feel that they have the time for this extra chore.

Amy: We don’t typically take the plastic bags in. Like I know you can do it to grocery stores, but that extra step doesn’t seem to happen very easily.

Chris: You can take certain things over to Far West Fibers [local recycling center], but then the added effort is usually an impediment.

Rebecca: There is not really time during the weekend between grocery shopping and kids’ activities to make a special trip to the recycling center, but down the line I can see that those are things that we would want to do. Right now, we are prioritizing sanity.

My informants care deeply about the environment and living sustainable lives, but they often find themselves needing to put other priorities first in their hectic lives.

Many of my informants like the idea of their waste having another life after it is no longer useful to them, and it alleviates their guilt related to consumption.

Emily: I always feel a little guilty when I get something from Amazon or something that is egregiously packaged. We just do our best to recycle the components.

While Yvonne believes that recycling is the most important thing her household does for the environment, others see recycling as a relatively unimportant aspect of their overall sustainability practices.

Kelly: I think recycling is a rather small drop in the bucket of how we are affecting the environment. I saw a bumper sticker recently that said, “Recycling: It’s the least you can do.” And I think, yes, that’s true it really is the least we can do. And Portland makes it ridiculously easy.

Kelly believes that recycling is the most insignificant pro-environmental practices a person can engage in.

For several informants, recycling waste is not sufficient for them to feel absolved of their guilt.

Eric: I think we are pretty good on the post-processing end. But we could definitely take some steps on the pre-end. For example, I took all the film stuff to New Seasons the other night. And as I was going through the process of recycling it, I am thinking to myself, “This is too much.” Even though we’re recycling it in this way. So that’s something that’s been on my mind as an opportunity as a household to improve.

Orla: We go through a lot of apple sauce pouches. We recycle them, but it would be nice to not buy them in the first place.

Penny: I will take plastic things to the special recycling place, including toys, just all plastic that isn’t curbside recycled I take over there. But I did some research and found out that they just ship it to China. So, then it is going on a boat across the world, and maybe not great things are happening with it.

Fiona: If I’m buying something I try to think about if the packaging is something that I can reuse as opposed to just recycle because I know that even recycling takes energy.

These informants realize that there are environmental costs associated with producing and recycling these materials, and the best option would be neither recycling nor sending materials to the landfill. They would prefer not to generate this waste in the first place but are constrained in their ability to avoid all waste-generating consumption. These informants feel as if they have no meaningful choice in “what materials they buy and thus turn into surplus stuff” (Gille, 2010: 1050).

Discussion and conclusion

Waste is visible, tangible evidence of things you have consumed. Once every week or two, your neighbors can see all of your trash awaiting removal, conspicuously piled right in front of your home. Household waste smells, it is unsightly, it attracts vermin, and it triggers disgust through our instinctive drive to avoid risks of contamination, parasites, and disease (Kelly, 2011: 1–58). In my sample of highly ecologically conscious households, being able to recycle made people feel happy, but the topic of packaging—things like plastic films and cardboard boxes—elicited powerful and unexpected negative reactions. At the same time, practices that involve allowing organic matter to decompose in the backyard, leaving urine unflushed in the toilet, or placing fabric contaminated with human urine and feces in the clothes washing machine elicited few negative reactions in the larger study (Munro, 2017).

During the 1970s and 1980s, concerns about the landfill crisis and the negative impacts of stray litter on wildlife and outdoor recreation formed the basis of much of popular environmental concern, and these images and campaigns are my informants’ earliest memories of pro-environmental practices. The primary message here is not about avoiding generating this trash in the first place, but rather about putting trash in the correct place—into the waste bin, and later on into the recycling bin. These early memories and experiences have influenced my informants’ adult views on pro-environmental practices—solid waste management is one of the first things that comes to mind when they think of the positive things they do for the environment. With the proliferation of disposable packaging in the 1970s and 1980s, consumers needed to be trained not to throw this packaging on the ground by the packaging industry itself, convincing people to take on the work of proper disposal of materials that only exist in the first place to allow for the sale of profitable single-use items.

Recycling evoked powerful positive emotions, and made many—though not all—of my informants feel happy and like they are “doing the right thing.” Recycling is a strong social norm in this community, and not being able to recycle something was described by Orla as painful. My informants were frustrated and upset when they found themselves too exhausted to put in the time and effort required to recycle all of their recyclable waste. Taking non-curbside recyclables to a special recycling center or washing out and drying a moldy glass food jar so that it can be recycled can be too much to ask of working parents of young children who are already pushed to their limits—they tell me they need to skip these activities so they can prioritize their “sanity,” but they do not feel good about doing so. Recycling also generates conflicts between household members with different levels of commitment to recycling guidelines. These changing and confusing guidelines create work for busy households trying to learn how to follow them.

Packaging, on the other hand, feels unnecessary and excessive, and it accumulates quickly in a busy household. Packaging is a reminder to my informants of the futility of many of their sustainability practices. It serves as a symbol of their lack of control, their participation in consumer culture, and their collusion with the economic institutions whose negative environmental impacts they oppose. While my informants take many steps to “undo” environmental damage that takes place and mitigate the environmental impact of their day-to-day lives, they are forced to purchase commodities from the market in order to survive. The strong negative responses to packaging are perhaps a displacement of a reality far too upsetting to acknowledge—that the most sustainable option in capitalism might be not existing at all.

While some popular conceptions of household sustainability might involve affluent families purchasing expensive “sustainable” commodities, my interviews revealed that time is a critically important resource for environmentally conscious households. Sorting waste for curbside pickup of recycling and trash—or bringing recycling to a special recycling center or bottle return—takes additional time rather than additional money. Avoiding waste in the first place is often more time-consuming than it is expensive. My informants were already stretched to their limits between their waged work and unwaged work as parents of young children. One affluent household I spoke with employs a domestic worker to outsource some of the work of managing household solid waste, but this was the exception. For most households, sorting waste is just one additional task they are compelled to perform in already busy lives.

My informant Eric told me, “I hate how everything goes into a container and that’s the default in our culture and our stores. Container within container within container. It’s so unnecessary.” But if capitalist firms are cost minimizers and profit maximizers, then this means that the packaging must be necessary—if it weren’t, they could save money by eliminating the “unnecessary” packaging. The spatial division of production makes this waste necessary. Accumulation necessitates waged workers who purchase commodities for their survival. Accumulation also necessitates production of these commodities in one place, and transportation to warehouses, stores, and ultimately to the end purchasers and users. And it is those household end users who are left holding the literal and figurative bag. They must process all of this packaging, trash, and recycling for disposal—unwaged work at the final stage of a household production process whose role in the capitalist economy is frequently overlooked.

I have attempted to show how a division of labor and production that is necessary for accumulation manifests itself in an inherent antagonism toward human well-being in a discussion of an easily overlooked aspect of day-to-day life: household solid waste management. The contradiction between social needs and capitalist production for profit is highlighted in a study of ecologically conscious households who are making concerted efforts to “do things differently” in order to minimize their negative impacts on the natural environment. Because of the limits to the efficacy of these efforts in capitalism, my ecologically conscious informants experience additional exhaustion, frustration, and conflict when they take on additional unwaged work in an attempt to undo environmental damage that originates at other sites and scales.

Highlights

Solid waste sorting in eco-friendly households contributes to frustration, exhaustion, and inter-personal conflict

Eco-conscious households see product packaging as a symbol of environmentally harmful consumption patterns

Recycling makes eco-conscious household members happy, but they are aware of the limits of recycling as a pro-environmental practice

Household waste disposal practices are tied closely to memories of school and public information campaigns from childhood

Household solid waste in capitalism is tied to the imperative of accumulation and the spatial division of labor and production

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my informants for taking time out of their busy schedules to share their lives with me. Thanks are owed to Chris O’Kane, Rob Hunter, and an anonymous referee who provided helpful comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

ORCID iD

Kirstin Munro

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