Charles Depman
Hundreds of thousands of tourists flood into the city of Agra, India, every year to see the gleaming marble of the Taj Mahal, a site immaculately kept since its completion in 1653. Emperor Shah Jahan, who had the Taj Mahal built as a tomb for his wife, kept the reflecting pools filled with water from the sacred Yamuna River that flows just meters from the Taj Mahal’s northern walls. During that time, royal visitors to the tomb could enjoy watching egrets fish among reeds and children play in the pristine waters. Today, tourists are quick to turn away from the black, lifeless waters of the Yamuna.
Ashwini Kumar Mishra, the cheery priest of a small Hindu temple and native of Agra, has taken up the mantle to fight for the Yamuna as the Mid Lower Yamuna Riverkeeper. Government incompetence and corruption, coupled with law-breaking, profit-driven industry, have defiled the Yamuna’s sacred waters almost to the point of oblivion. He, along with his congregation and volunteers, has been working for years to spread awareness about water pollution and to pressure the local government to take necessary action on the Yamuna.
In 2010, Mishra succeeded, through petitions and peaceful protests, in forcing the local government to begin construction on a series of lagoons that serve as a natural treatment system for sewage in western Agra. Before his campaign, thousands of gallons of raw sewage would empty straight into the Yamuna before flowing past the Taj Mahal.
“This is what the entire waste canal looked like before 2010,” Mishra said, pointing to the head pond of the treatment system. It was black and rank, an open sewer for the surrounding communities. But as Mishra walked me along a dirt path that follows the snaking lagoons, the stench was replaced by an earthier, wetland smell.
Three years on, the lagoons form a six kilometer network of thriving wetlands. As Mishra gave us a tour of the first three kilometers, I saw dozens of bird species, including a kingfisher and a peacock—India’s national bird—and heard the steady hum of a thriving insect population. In several of the lower lagoons, fish broke the water’s surface as they came up to feed on insects.
Still, this is only a small piece to the puzzle. The Yamuna, the largest tributary of the Ganges River in northern India, is an extremely sick river. Running 1,376 kilometers (855 mi) from its origin in the Himalayas, the Yamuna is depended upon by tens of millions of people for water.
Even though Mishra organizes numerous riverside cleanup events with thousands of attendees, many of whom are devotees at his temple, the Yamuna’s riverbed is parched in many places, blanketed with trash, debris and illegal laundry operations. What remains of the Yamuna’s once mighty flow is a black, noxious stream that offers little comfort to the livestock, children and stray dogs that can be seen wading through it on a hot afternoon.
“It used to be as wide as several superhighways and now it is barely as wide as a two lane road,” said one of Mishra’s friends, a native of Agra. “We used to swim in there as children, whole packs of us. Now only the poor children swim in there to bathe … and they don’t know any better about the health risks.”
Industrial pollution and sewage are immediate problems, but much larger issues sit upstream: dams and diversions. These are especially complex problems as India tries to feed and power its burgeoning population.
In India’s capital, New Delhi, north of Agra on the Yamuna, Minakshi Arora, the Mid Upper Yamuna Riverkeeper, and her husband, Kesar Singh, the Lower Yamuna Riverkeeper, face similar challenges. The couple, devoted water activists, also spend their time running the Hindi regional section of India Water Portal, a web-based interactive platform covering topics related to water management challenges and offering practical solutions for daily water-related issues.
Arora and Singh took me to a stretch of the Yamuna located between two thermal power plants in the south of New Delhi. A small barrage sits under a bridge crossing the Yamuna and the overflow spills down a modest three foot drop. The black water is so heavily polluted that it froths up into little foam icebergs that continue downstream. Unfortunately for clean water advocates in New Delhi, this part of the Yamuna contains little fresh water to begin with. Farther upstream, a series of large barrages divert most of the water towards agricultural and industrial use. The flow that enters this length of the Yamuna is composed almost entirely of untreated wastewater from 16 massive pipes that carry the city’s sewage.
After trekking along this stinking stretch of the Yamuna for several kilometers in the scorching heat, the three of us took a seat in the shade near a highway turnoff. Every minute or so, a car would pull up and a passenger would take a plastic bag of trash out of their trunk. Some would walk over to the river embankment and hurl the trash, still in the bag, directly into the river. Others would wait for a half-naked man to come up the embankment from his boat and do the deed for them in exchange for several rupees.
“See the high fence they built along that bridge,” said Kesar, pointing up to a 10 foot wall of mesh wire that ran the entire span of the bridge, “they built that so people would stop throwing trash bags out of their car windows into the river.”
“Throwing organic waste into the sacred Yamuna River for it to wash away is an old tradition among Hindus,” Arora explained to me back in the bustling heart of New Delhi, “But now much of the waste is inorganic and doesn’t degrade. It is also traditional for people to dispose of bodies in the river. Now the river hardly flows and the population has exploded. So the river can no longer serve as it did once. But traditions stick and people keep defiling the Yamuna. Government campaigns to curb this have had little effect.”
Another well-known river activist, Sudhirendar Sharma, sat down with me over chai tea and told me about Balbir Singh Seechewal, a famed river activist in the state of Punjab. In 2007 Seechewal initiated a campaign to clean the Kali Bein, a 160-kilometer-long stream sacred to Sikhs, with the help of thousands of community members. Encroachment by farmers, silt deposition and pollution from wild growth had virtually obliterated the Kali Bein. But under Seechewal’s leadership, volunteers dredged the stream bed and cleaned the stream bank. Under pressure from the movement, towns along the stream’s course stopped dumping raw sewage into it. The government of Sultanpur Lodhi, the largest city the Kali Bein runs through, agreed to build a sewage treatment plant for the urban waste fouling the waters. The Kali Bein’s transformation was stunning and Seechewal continues his fight for clean water to this day.
Sharma told me this story to highlight the importance of victories on smaller water bodies in India. Because the issues facing large rivers such as the Yamuna are so colossal, and almost impossible to remedy without a concerted, multi-year effort by the government, he recommended focusing on smaller rivers and streams where more tangible victories might be won.
I was saddened to see the state of some of India’s most sacred waterways up close, but I was also encouraged to meet such passionate activists that are working to change the status quo. Indeed, as Waterkeeper Alliance and other domestic and international environmental organizations continue to support the work of clean-water activists in India and across the rest of Asia, I am hopeful that change will come, if slowly, and people will once again be able to enjoy their right to swimmable, drinkable, fishable waters.
Visit EcoWatch’s WATER page for more related news on this topic.
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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