The Bathtub Analogy.

I have recycled my whole life. Growing up, my mom was the “before it was hip” recycler and hippie Los Angeles school teacher that was was religious about her family’s recycling habits

Okay, let’s get back to the point at hand. Recycling.

In 2018, plastic generation was 35.7 million tons in the United States. In 2018, the plastic recycling rate was also 8.7%. The odds are not looking good.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am a die-hard recycler. I sort the recycling in my building’s trash room (I know, it’s a bit gross), and I have been known to rearrange the trash/recycle bins in a classroom only to be told “none of it matters anyway” by a rather moody student.

There’s an analogy that I love, and it describes this type of situation perfectly. It describes most climate change situations perfectly if we’re being honest.

Imagine there is a bathtub. The bathtub is overflowing with water and making a mess of the whole damn bathroom. We try to solve the problem by taking buckets and scooping the water out of the bathtub. This helps a little bit, but only for a few seconds, because the tap is still running and the bathtub is soon overflowing again.

For some reason, we haven’t given an A+ attempt at turning off the tap, and seem to forget it’s the real reason the bathtub is overflowing. Instead, we tell everyone else to grab a bucket and start scooping the water out of the bathtub. Everyone is stressed out. “What if I don’t scoop enough water out?” “Oh my god, I forgot to scoop water out yesterday!”

Sound familiar?

This analogy can be applied to way too many things, but in this case we’re going to say that the water is the plastic problem in America and the act of scooping the water out of the bathtub is the recycling system. Why aren’t we turning off the tap? Or, why aren’t we stopping the production of plastic all together?

An idea like that sounds far-fetched and wild, but it doesn’t seem so to me. We’ve lived consistently with plastic for 60 years. That’s it. And in that time they’ve provided problems that we will be cleaning up for a long time.

So, the question is: How do we stop the production of plastic so that the source of the overflowing bathtub stops all together?

The answer is, I’m not really sure. Among a slieu of other topics and problems this country (and the world) faces, I’m trying to figure out how to solve it on a larger level. I’m sick of encouraging people to recycle. I’m still going to, but I wish I had better odds of the outcome.

So take this as your piece of grace. I know there are a lot of people out there who are so strict with themselves about recycling or never throwing away something that can be recycled. I get it. I want my pieces of plastic to go on to be in the highest percentile of plastics being recycled too.

But save your energy where you can. Save that energy and put it towards having open and educated conversations with people about our role in the climate movement. Take that energy and put it towards reading a book about environmental activism. Or, simply take that energy and put it towards yourself, because you deserve peace and mental space.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for tuning in :)

You’re great, and I’m so happy you’re here. 

p.s. unclench your jaw. k thanks.