Recycling is not necessarily good for the environment.

Or at least it might not be unless it’s done correctly, claimed Walla Walla City Manager Duane Cole, speaking at Walla Walla Community College last week.

“The city and I personally support recycling and I did not propose to end it,” Cole said.  “With that said, however, the systems we design can be questioned depending on what we are trying to achieve.”

The current recycling system in Walla Walla involves weekly curbside pickup for all private residences. After recyclables are collected, they are baled and hauled by diesel truck to Portland or Seattle, explained Cole. There they are separated and likely sent to a remanufacturing plant or prepared for shipment to Asia.  Cole questioned whether or not this made sense from a carbon emission perspective.

In addition, he estimated that fumes from 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel might be pumped into the air every year from the trucks going to houses alone. He questioned whether or not alternatives exist that would reduce this amount of fuel.

One of the alternatives he mentioned would have residents take their recyclables to depots located in convenient locations like grocery stores. Cole recognized that this sort of system would require monitoring depots to prevent trash-dumping. He also acknowledged that it would likely lower recycling participation.

“But if recycling is right to do and the carbon footprint of the current system is pretty high, then people ought to do it,” Cole said of a self-hauling system.

City Council and Walla Walla County Resource Conservation Committee member Barbara Clark is not so sure it’s as simple as that.

“With a depot, we simply don’t collect as much stuff if people have to individually take things somewhere,” Clark said.

Clark is a member of Walla Walla 2020, an environmentally-aimed civic group with goals to “envision, plan for and undertake projects to help realize a livable community in the Walla Walla area now and for the future,” according to their mission statement.

The group has existed since 1988 and has been monitoring local recycling since it first began in the late ’80s with Neighborhood Stations similar to the suggested depots. The group reported that 22,000 pounds of recyclables were collected in a month of Neighborhood Station recycling. The group also reported that 39,000 pounds of recyclables were collected in just a week after curbside recycling was instated in 1997.

The significant difference between these amounts makes Clark hesitant to return to such a system.
Clark also questioned how much less fuel would actually be emitted with a depot system.

“Thirty thousand people in their cars going to depots … is that going to really reduce the carbon in the air?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”

A second alternative that Cole raised was the conversion of recycling vehicles from Diesel into a non-carbon generating fuel as a potential future service.

Finally, Cole raised the point that if landfills continue to fill at the current rate, the city has 950 years left of space.

“Would it make more sense and reduce the carbon footprint of the community to not recycle at all at this time while working on a plan to mine the landfill in the future for waste to energy, raw material, or some other purpose?” Cole asked.

Sophomore Lauren Imbrock agreed with this point made by Cole.

“It takes a lot of energy to recycle. I feel like there are other more important things that we could do first that could be more effective than recycling,” Imbrock said.

Sophomore Carly Spiering was more hesitant.

“I don’t know … once you stop actively pursuing something, it kind of takes a backburner,” Spiering said. “I don’t want to write off recycling just yet.”

While Clark agreed that shipping recyclables to other cities and countries was not the best thing for the environment, she said that she would like to see recycling become more localized.

“I do think it’s important to continue recycling. But the first thing is to reduce,” Clark said.

“You probably grow up hearing, reduce, reuse, recycle. Well, for most people it’s, ‘Maybe I’ll recycle.’ The reduce and the reuse are pretty much neglected,” Clark said.

Clark said that society has increasingly turned away from reusing household items, and that has resulted in an enormous amount of waste.

“That is a huge cultural change. We’re really in a throwaway culture,” she said.

“At some point, you can’t just keep throwing stuff in a dump. You have to use it again.”