In late September, veteran journalist and public television host Bill Moyers, now eighty-years old, announced he was finally retiring (and yes, this time he means it) after more than 40 years as one of the nation's most trusted voices in news, politics and culture.
Though he briefly left television in 2010 after his show Bill Moyers' Journal came to end, he and his team returned to public television with a new show, Moyers & Company, in 2012. Alongside a new web platform, BillMoyers.com, the show became a weekly assessment of current events with Moyers interviewing some of the leading voices and experts on economic, political, environmental and social issues.
However, in his note to viewers on Sept. 29, Moyers wrote that as the end of the third year of Moyers & Company approaches "it’s time finally to sign off."
He will do so, he said, "as the luckiest fellow in broadcast journalism for having been a part of public television for over half of my 80 years. I never expected such a full and satisfying run at work I could love so much, and I am deeply indebted to everyone with whom I have been associated on this long and rewarding journey."
Though the final show is scheduled to air on Jan. 2, Moyers took time on Thursday of this week to participate in an online Q&A with his viewers to discuss the nature of his work, plans for the future, and his current take on the key political issues that have been at the core of so much of his journalistic work.
The Q&A's lead-off question got straight to the point, with a participant asking Moyers to identify the three most important issues now facing the nation and to explain their significance.
Moyers responded:
"[1] We have to figure out how to have a morally-based conversation about politics and economics. If it's all about money and return on investment and stock shares and all that, instead of what kind of society works best for those who don't have such 'goods,' we're finished as a democracy, because some people will be able to buy anything they want and vast numbers of others will be unable to afford what they need. [2] The corruption of power and money is so pervasive and systemic that we have to take it on at every level, which requires that [3] there has to be a broad-based movement for democracy that mirrors and exceeds what Bill McKibben, 350.org and kindred spirits like Naomi Klein have built to reverse global warming."
A follow-up question targeted the familiar question among many progressives, which asked if it was time to do away with the two-party system that dominates U.S. domestic politics.
"Even if it were time, it's not going to happen," Moyers wrote. "The two parties are too entrenched in the rule-making process that enables them to make their own elimination impossible. Both parties have lost their footing, however, in the everyday experience of real people and they have to be challenged without remorse or retreat. Someone has said Left and Right have lost their footing, but the Right is more certain about what it wants. It wants control of the Republican Party. The Left is too content just to rent space in the attic from the Democrats. Until that changes, the Republican Party is going to be too extreme and the Democrats too enfeebled. Neither will change voluntarily because the people in charge have too great a stake in the status quo."
Moyers acknowledged the reality that a majority of people simply are not paying attention to these key political issues, but that this fact should not dissuade those who are paying attention from continuing to push for the necessary changes. "The fate of society—especially democracy," he said, "depends upon the minority of people who care enough to engage and stay engaged." He urged those viewing the conversation to engage with their neighbors and create what he called a "Committee of Correspondence" in order to foment local discussion and action. Moyers invoked the 20th century Wisconsin progressive Robert "Fighting Bob" LaFollette who said that "democracy is a life" and one that "requires constant struggle."
And in a final word, Moyers offered this message:
The greatest challenge we face in America today is to stop the buying and selling of our politicians and political process by corporations and the rich. You may have seen the story earlier this week: For the first time ever the Vatican rented out the Sistine Chapel to a corporation—Porsche—for guests who paid $8,000 a head to attend a concert there. For the first time a corporate donor determined who could be invited to that sacred place. That's what has happened to democracy. Either we reverse Citizens United and insist democracy is about equal representation, or we might as well close up shop.
What follows is a sampling of some of the other questions submitted and the responses offered by Moyers:
Q: What do you think is the single most important thing everyday people can do to get the country back in balance?
Join with someone else like-minded and keep adding others. For example, suppose two of you, six of you, 60 of you showed up at the next public event where your Member of Congress is asking for your vote, circulate printed records of who has contributed money to him/her, and start peppering him/her with questions. Then be at the next rally, or if it's where you can't get to, use your "Committee of Correspondence" to alert the one(s) near where he or she will next appear.
Q: Do you support a Constitutional amendment to get the money out of politics and end corporate personhood?
Yes. One that says: "Corporations are not people. Money is not speech."
Q: I marched on Sept. 22 with 400,000 others in the People's Climate March. My mother marched on the first Earth Day, 1970. After that one, impressive strides were made toward cleaner air and sustainability. This time, I get the feeling that news of the march has been suppressed; beyond the choir that marched, few have even heard of it. What is your take?
Corporate media largely ignored it—you are right. And then, three days after the march the U.S. started bombing in Syria and Iraq and stories about the march and climate change were driven from the news. Fortunately, we still have the web to create alternative media to spread the word.
P.S. Don't quit marching because the press doesn't notice.
Q: How do you stay optimistic in the face of all the serious problems we are facing?
I'm not always optimistic. Sometimes I despair. But reading history helps (in fact, I strongly urge all of you to seek out and read Frank Rich's stunning article on the cover of New York Magazine about the year 1964—and so many of us fooled ourselves about the nature of progress. Perspective helps: I don't think anything we are facing today, except for global warming, is more than my grandparents and my parents faced. Remember, they lived through the First Gilded Age or the Roaring Twenties that flamed out into Great Depression. World War II. The Holocaust. Sustained racism. The Korean War. Vietnam. And so on. So I take heart that if they tackled their generation's challenges, we can, too. Furthermore, as the political scientist Gramsci said (and I may not have it exactly): Practice the pessimism of the mind—see the world as it is without rose colored glasses; but also practice the optimism of the will—do whatever you can, wherever you are, to make this a better world. We have to keep criticizing what's wrong, but we are also obligated to act to change what it is we are criticizing.
Q: You are one of the best, if not the best, interviewers today. What makes a great interview? How do you approach each interview?
Thanks. For me the key is editing. Anyone can go on at length in a conversation, but bringing a long conversation down to its essence without the guest feeling exploited requires a team of people devoted to that purpose, and I have that kind of team: researchers, producers, editors, colleagues. It also takes sustained preparation—either from life experiences or focused study. I read widely, keep notes, clip articles, and then from a thorough briefing book prepared by that team I mentioned, I try to outline what interests me and what might interest you (the viewer). That road map helps even when spontaneity seizes either the guest or me. We usually converse for an hour and what you see on the screen is our best effort to do justice to what the guest truly wanted to say. I've been at this for 41 years and cannot remember a single guest who complained he or she was misrepresented, even when I am disagreeing.
Q: As the next generation of journalists get their chops, who would you suggest we listen to or read?
There are so many I couldn't begin to single them out. For all the woes of newspapers and all the shallowness of television, there is world-class journalism happening today in every medium. "Search and ye shall find" those who move, inform, and inspire you. We're experiencing a surge of long-form journalism in books, and I'll post some of my favorites at billmoyers.com before my last broadcast on Jan. 2.
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According to Forbes, the Three R's sustainability catch-phrase, and the recycling cause it bolstered, remain synonymous with the U.S. environmental movement itself. There's only one problem: despite being touted as one of the most important personal actions that individuals can take to help the planet, "recycling" – as currently carried out in the U.S. – doesn't work and doesn't help.
Turns out, there is a vast divide between the misleading, popular notion of recycling as a "solution" to the American overconsumption problem and the darker reality of recycling as a failing business model.
The Myth: Recycling Began as a Plastics' Industry Marketing Tactic
A recycling dumpster in Los Angeles. Citizen of the Planet / Education Images / Universal Images Group / Getty Images
When it was first introduced, recycling likely had altruistic motivations, Forbes reported. However, the system that emerged was never equipped to handle high volumes. Unfortunately, as consumption increased, so too did promotion of recycling as a solution. The system "[gave] manufacturers of disposable items a way to essentially market overconsumption as environmentalism," Forbes reported. Then and now, "American consumers assuage any guilt they might feel about consuming mass quantities of unnecessary, disposable goods by dutifully tossing those items into their recycling bins and hauling them out to the curb each week."
Little has changed since that Forbes article, titled "Can Recycling Be Bad For The Environment?," was published almost a decade ago; increases in recycling have been eclipsed by much higher consumption rates. In fact, consumerism was at an all-time high in January 2020 before the pandemic hit, Trading Economics reported.
But, if the system doesn't work, why does it continue? Turns out, consumers were misled – by the oil and gas industry. News reports from September 2020 revealed how the plastic industry-funded ads in the 1980s that heralded recycling as a panacea to our growing waste problem. These makers of virgin plastics were the biggest proponents and financial sponsors of plastic recycling programs because they created the illusion of a sustainable, closed-cycle while actually promoting the continued use of raw materials for new single-use plastics.
To the masses, these programs justified overconsumption and eased concerns over trash that could be thrown into recycling bins, Forbes reported. Generations of well-meaning Americans since the 1970's and '80's – believing these communications masterminds – have dutifully used-then-recycled plastics and other materials. They trusted that their discards would be reborn as new goods instead of ending up in oceans and landfills.
The plastics industry went even further, lobbying 40 states to put the recycling triangle symbol on all plastic – even if it wasn't recyclable, Houston Public Media reported. This bolstered the public image of plastic as a renewable resource, but the cost was clarity about what actually can be recycled. As recent as 2020, a Greenpeace report found that many U.S. products labeled as recyclable could not actually be processed by most domestic material recovery facilities.
The Reality: Most Recyclables Aren't Being Recycled
An initial pre-sort removes contaminates, items that can't be recycled, at Republic Services in Anaheim, California on Thursday, April 15, 2021. Paul Bersebach / MediaNews Group / Orange County Register / Getty Images
The U.S. relies on single-stream recycling systems, in which recyclables of all sorts are placed into the same bin to be sorted and cleaned at recycling facilities. Well-meaning consumers are often over-inclusive, hoping to divert trash from landfills. Unfortunately, the trash often ends up there anyways – with the additional cost of someone at a recycling plant sorting through it.
The single-stream system is easier on consumers, but results in a mixed stream of materials that is easy to contaminate, hard to sort and more expensive to process. There are a variety of items – including dirty pizza boxes, old clothing, hangers, plastic bags, aerosols, batteries and electronics – that, if added to a residential recycling bin, will contaminate the entire batch of recyclables, a Miami recycling center representative told EcoWatch. At that point, it can be too costly and too dangerous for employees to hand-pick out erroneous items. Because these items cannot be processed in the same way as recyclable materials, their inclusion often means the whole batch will fetch a lower price from buyers or must be thrown away.
"Most people have the attitude that if they just put it in the blue bin, it will get taken away and somebody will figure out what to do with it, but putting something in the blue bin and actually recycling it are two very different things," said David Biderman, CEO and executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America.
Misunderstandings, misinformation and mislabeling aside, the harsh reality was and remains that most plastic can't and won't be recycled, reported NPR. For example, the EPA reported that plastic generation in 2018 was 35.7 million tons, accounting for 12.2 percent of municipal solid waste (MSW) that year. Of this total, only three million tons were recycled (an 8.7 percent recycling rate). The vast majority – 27 million tons – ended up in landfills, and the rest was combusted. The environmental agency also estimated that less than 10 percent of plastic thrown in bins in the last 40 years has actually been recycled.
The situation is slightly better for other recyclables, though they make up a smaller percentage of MSW. For example, glass products totaled 12.3 million tons in 2018, or 4.2 percent of the annual MSW generation. Almost 25 percent of glass was recycled, 61.6 percent ended up in landfills and 13.4 percent was combusted.
Post-consumer paper and cardboard for 2018 totaled 67.4 million tons, or 23.1 percent of total MSW generation for the year. The material also had the highest recycling rate of any other material in MSW – 68.2 percent. 25.6 percent of paper ended up in landfills and 6.23 percent was combusted.
According to this EPA data, recyclable plastics, glass and paper accounted for 18.5 percent, 5.2 percent and 11.8 percent of MSW landfilled in 2018, respectively. Those three materials alone comprised 35.5 percent of the total landfilled trash in the U.S. for the year; had they been properly collected, processed and purchased, they theoretically could have been diverted and recycled.
The Reason: Recycling Is Bad Business Around the World
Recyclable waste must be sorted, cleaned and processed before it can be sold as a commodity on the open market. Nareeta Martin / Unsplash
Unfortunately, the EPA data also shows that 2018 was not an anomaly but rather another data point showing how the single-stream system in the U.S. has never been economically viable or feasible on a large scale. To further understand why recycling in America is failing, we need to think of recycled goods as commodities – because that's what they are.
According to the recycling center representative, municipalities and counties pay for residential and commercial recyclables to be trucked to local and regional recycling plants for processing. Clean batches are sorted and/or compressed into bales of similar plastics, paper, aluminum or glass. The centers sell the cleaned recyclables on the open market to buyers who will process them into recycled materials like plastic pellets or post-consumer paper; these can be turned into new products.
This entire process – the processing and creation of saleable recycled goods – costs money. As with any good, profitability requires selling for a higher price than it costs to make. Contaminated batches are harder to process into new products and therefore fetch a lower price on the market, if they can be sold at all. Currently, U.S. recyclables are no longer profitable, and no one wants to buy them.
China used to buy the majority of the world's plastics and paper for recycling, The New York Times reported. The U.S. has been the #1 generator of plastic waste in the world for years and used to ship more than half of its total plastic production to China, a November 2020 study found. The research also noted that up to one-fourth of American plastics sent abroad were contaminated or of poor quality, which would make it extremely difficult to recycle anyways.
Starting Jan. 1, 2018, China banned imports of most scrap materials because shipments were too contaminated, The Times reported; the country no longer wanted to be the "world's garbage dump."
As a result, the U.S. and other Western nations who had relied on China to offload their recyclables saw a "mounting crisis" of paper and plastic waste building up in ports and recycling facilities, The Times reported.
The Western nations began sending recyclable waste to other Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, India and Malaysia. These countries often lacked the infrastructure to handle recyclables, so a lot of the waste ended up incinerated or landfilled
In response, in 2019, the United Nations passed an amendment to the Basel Convention hoping to protect the poor and developing countries who'd taken up China's vacated role in the global recycling trade. The amendment ambitiously aimed to clean up the global trade in plastic waste, making it more transparent and better regulated and allowing developing countries to reject contaminated shipments. The U.S. did not ratify the amendment, and new evidence suggests it continues to send illegal and/or contaminated shipments to developing countries.
Domestically, the closing of the Chinese market to U.S. recyclables bankrupted many domestic recycling programs because there was too much supply and no real demand. The smaller Asian countries could not accept nearly as much as China had. Prices of recyclables dropped, and bales of scrap materials were sent to landfills and incinerators when they couldn't be sold, another Times article reported.
This left waste-management companies around the country with no market for recyclabes, The Atlantic reported. They've been forced to go back to cities and municipalities with two choices: pay a lot more to get rid of their recycling or throw it away. The news report noted that most are choosing the latter.
"The economics are challenging," agreed Nilda Mesa, director of the Urban Sustainability and Equity Planning Program at the Earth Institute's Center for Sustainable Urban Development. "If there is not a market for the recycled material, then the numbers do not work for these facilities as well as cities, as they need to sell the materials to recoup their costs of collection and transportation, and even then it's typically only a portion of the costs," Columbia's State of the Planet reported.
Tiffany Duong is an avid ocean advocate. She holds degrees from UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and is an Al Gore Climate Reality Leader and student member of The Explorer's Club.
She spent years as a renewable energy lawyer in L.A. before moving to the Amazon to conduct conservation fieldwork (and revamp her life). She eventually landed in the Florida Keys as a scientific scuba diver and field reporter and writes about the oceans, climate, and the environment from her slice of paradise. Follow her on Twitter/Instagram @lilicedt.
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