We’re currently in the meatiest portion of the spring conference season. Packaging World editors attend a lot of packaging conferences, expos, and events, and as you would expect, many of them focus on sustainability. Because we’re in packaging, recycling tends to be the biggest topic within the broader sustainability theme.
At these events, I have an admittedly oddball habit of auditing trash bins. My anecdotal findings might be depressing if they weren’t so revealing of the problem we face with recycling. Next time you’re at a sustainable packaging conference, I challenge you to look in the garbage. Try to mask your surprise when you see a mix of PP coffee lids, aluminum Diet Coke cans, PET Coke bottles, and thermoformed PET drink cups, all co-mingled in the trash. This even occurs when there’s a single-stream recycling bin right next to the trash can. It also happens at those well-marked but still somehow confusing disposal stations that we see in major expo halls. They clearly state where paper, plastic, and aluminum ought to go. In my experience, they’re all like that. No conference or expo is immune; recycling adherence is almost coincidental.
Shouldn’t the speakers and attendees in these halls be among the most adept with materials and recyclability? And given the subject matter floating around the room, shouldn’t recycling at least be top-of-mind? I should add here, I have no doubt that I've been guilty of this, too. I try, but I'm not absolving myself of this behavior.
As a fellow perpetrator of what I'm criticizing, I have insider knowledge of a few factors that may be at play here. One might be that those conference attendees are too smart for their own (or the greater) good. Many folks in the know wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to assume that, at a private hotel conference hall, that Diet Coke can isn’t getting recycled anyway, regardless of which bin it ends up in. Why make the extra effort? And at a basic human level, what’s one Diet Coke can? Of course, extrapolating that piece of human-nature to 8 billion plus folks is a problem.
