One experience that has stood out to me has been visiting the recycling facility Recycle Here. When we moved in I was surprised that our apartment and many other buildings nearby didn’t have recycling. Recycling is second nature since I’ve grown up doing it and I felt so weird just throwing things out, so Alona looked up how we could recycle on our own and found Recycle Here. The organization has a huge drop-off warehouse garage place with different bins for different materials. An upside to this system is that you can recycle more there than you can with curbside programs, like plastic bags, styrofoam, and electronics. I thought that it was really cool that someone took it upon themselves to set this up since the city couldn’t offer the service, but the site still mainly caters to those who are more privileged as it is located very close to mid/downtown and requires that you have time and transportation to bring your own recycling to the facility.
I had never really thought of recycling as a luxury before, but now I’m seeing that it really is one. Besides the fact that a city must have enough money to provide this service to everyone, the residents must also be lucky enough to have the time and energy to worry about doing it. If someone is working multiple jobs to make ends meet, or worrying about their child’s education suffering from lack of funding, or violence and police brutality, what happens to their plastic containers may not be that big of a concern to them which is very understandable. Hopefully one day Detroit will have enough funds to make recycling service more accessible to everyone, but even then they have a lot of work to do before more residents can be expected to have the time and energy to be able to use it. All of the problems that many of the organizations we are working with are trying to solve need to be addressed before things like recycling are really a big concern here. I had always wondered why the national rate of recycling was so low but after going to Recycle Here and thinking about this I see that things like recycling are a privilege that many in America don’t have. Besides being horrible for a million other reasons, institutionalized racism is preventing many people from having the resources to be able to make recycling and other environmentally conscious behaviors the norm.
