And even the appearance of it—a pastiche of industrial chic,
street artistry, found objects, and, yes, even a pretty extensive panoply of bins
of reusable materials, all monitored by reliably bearded and tattooed staffers—is
probably closer to the mental image of what community recycling could, or
should, look like. “Taking out the
trash” isn’t just utilitarian and mundane; it’s fashionable, eye-catching and
even sorta fun.
Despite my evocation of hipster clichés, Recycle Here! feels like a
novelty, at least in part because it’s among the few ways that residents of the
Detroit can divert their discarded objects from landfills. Long notorious as the largest city in
the country without a municipal recycling system (both elective and compulsory),
Detroit has also striven to find creative ways to curtail the illegal dumping
that took place on its copious vacant lots—much of it recyclable material. A group of
Wayne State University students founded Recycle Here! in 2005 as a response to
the obvious dearth of options serving Midtown, then as today an emerging
neighborhood with visible signs of homespun reinvestment.
As smart as the initiative was, it couldn’t easily both fund
itself and support a demand that clearly stretched well beyond Midtown. By 2007, the Greater Detroit Resource
Recovery Program (GDRPP) began funding Recycle Here! as the City’s de facto recycling center, all while expanding its outreach by offering additional
drop-off days, a broader array of recyclable materials, and satellite locations
elsewhere in the city. In addition, the partnership has
allowed curbside recycling pilot programs in three neighborhoods: Rosedale
Park, East English Village and Palmer Woods/University District—with intention
to grow throughout the city in the long-term. The Michigan Municipal League website points out some
of the other accomplishments: a growth of over 50% each year since opening; a
non-profit spin-off called Green Living Science that has educated Detroit
Public Schools on recycling initiatives; a for-profit arm called GreenSafe that
sells recycled products to major consumption events, like Detroit Lions
games.
Even if it’s essentially an arm of city government, the
Recycle Here! facility never for a moment feels like one. The loudspeakers churn out tunes from a
diverse array of genres, no doubt reflective of the eclectic taste of whoever
is in charge at that moment. On
the busiest days of operation (typically Saturdays), a local vendor offers
cheap French press coffee, and various food trucks tote their comestibles in
the outside parking lot. Another
staffer sells screen printed t-shirts, virtually all of them featuring the
ingenious and ubiquitous Recycle Here! bumblebee logo, designed by local artist
Carl Oxley III:
And the bumblebee receives its share of competition from the
other sculptures and murals that form a consistent backdrop to the more
utilitarian goings-on up front:
If it isn’t already obvious, Recycle Here! has achieved what
it ostensibly needed to do in order to ensure survivability: it evolved into a
smartly-branded community gathering place. And it’s a good thing it works so well: the process of
recycling here is far from hassle-free.
Yes, the bins separate Styrofoam peanuts from other types of
Styrofoam. Visitors also have to
hold all their plastics up to the light to see if the etching indicates a #1 or
#2 (one bin) or #3 through #7 (a separate series of bins). And cardboard gets separated from office
paper, which in turn has a separate bin from newspaper, as well as glossy
paper.
And less common materials need separating too.
Clear glass could contain a lot of items: salad dressings,
pasta sauce, artichoke hearts, pickled pigs’ lips. But colored glass usually captures a discrete family of
consumable products.
Booze. These
days, varietals of wine do not delineate social strata that easily; even a few
highbrow wines might reach the dinner table in a cardboard box. But it’s very easily to distinguish consumers
by the type of beer they drink.
And the beer bottles at Recycle Here! overwhelmingly fit a certain
category: the non-corporate.
Whether it’s a microbrew from the Upper Peninsula or a
Singaporean IPA, the beers being recycled here are the opposite of what about 85%
of America drinks. No watered-down
Coors, Michelob, Budweiser. The
only beers found in the bins that would pass as mainstream working-class
Americana are Pabst Blue Ribbon or this Miller High Life, like the one strangely
perched, unopened, on the rim of the Clear Glass bin.
In other words, hipster beers.
Probably I’m going out on a limb by making inferences about cultures by the type of beers they consume, but not really, or at least not
enough. I don’t think we witness a
dearth of Budweiser bottles because Detroiters simply don’t drink cheap
beer. I think the beers we see in
these bins broadly reflects the ethos of people who go out of their way to
recycle, and in Detroit, “going out of the way is” precisely what most people
have to do. In short, the act of
recycling not only requires the active involvement of driving to the facility
(at least for everyone outside those three affluent pilot neighborhoods), it
also requires extensive separation once you get there. If you have two boxes to deposit, it
could take you over an hour to get it all done. The staff at Recycle Here! makes the compelling
argument that their approach not only ensures more material gets successfully
recycled than if it all gets lumped together, but it also encourages the
population to become more invested in the process. While this may be true, it almost undoubtedly also scares
off a huge contingent who simply doesn’t want to be bothered.
Thus, Recycle Here! succeeds because there are enough Detroiters,
favorably disposed toward urban living, educated enough to have some disposable
income, and predominantly left-of-center, all of whom at least value the idea
of sustainability in its various incarnations: locally sourced food, fair trade
or free-range growing practices, and non-corporate brews with higher alcohol
content (and higher prices). It
fits like a hand in glove, and the fact that quality French press coffee gets
served on Saturdays makes as much sense as the absence of a vendor selling
McDonald’s, no matter how much Mickey Dee’s coffee has improved in recent
years. Through Recycle Here! and
the pilot programs in those selective, higher-income, stable neighborhoods, the
Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Program has found the right niche to plant a
seed. It offers a confident start
to set the trajectory for a city-wide recycling system.
Now if only they could figure out where
all those bottles of Bud Lite are going.
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