Recycle mania

If you've noticed my pics of school lunch, you probably have seen the daily ration of fresh dairy milk (from local cows, goodness knows where they are in the prefecture), packed in glass bottles with old fashioned paper lids. One of my elementary schools has switched to paper cartons though, claiming that the manufacturer has abandoned the glass system for ease of transport and recyclability. So now the students spend 5 minutes after lunch peeling the cartons open by hand, rinsing them in buckets and letting them dry before putting them in recycling bins. It's fairly fiddly to take the cartons apart, but I think they'll get it eventually.

In most cases I'd laud the effort to go green, but I've learned that what consumers do with their waste is just a tiny part of the whole recycling process. So here's my analysis of the whole glass bottle versus paper carton thing that might spread to all the other schools in my town.

Glass bottles are heavy and fragile, and make transport and handling difficult or dangerous at times. That being said, I've never seen a single student, even in elementary school, break a milk bottle, full or empty, so the safety issue is a bit moot. The weight of the bottles factors in the transport, since you need more fuel to truck heavy things around. The bottles are reused, so the cleaning process has to be really thorough since milk is one of the most perishable and easily contaminated foods out there. So there's a water and infrastructure cost as well.

When packed in cartons, any beverage becomes easier to transport, not only because of handling issues, but because more of a consignment is actual product by weight. So you save money on fuel and truck hire since you can deliver more beverage for your buck. Having the consumer take on the responsibility for cleaning and recycling the packaging also relieves the financial and ecological burden on the manufacturer. I reckon the trade off is that the concept of the cold chain becomes way more important since paper is a poorer insulator than glass. Ever notice how a stubby keeps it's cool really well? Same concept here. Refrigerated transport costs a lot, not only in terms of energy but in environmentally suspect coolant and insulating material too.

Sure you might say that the fact that the cartons are recycled makes the change worthwhile. However this is only the case if the cartons are really recycled instead of being burnt at the dump. It's generally taken for granted that the recycling process goes on as planned after the garbage trucks pick up the sorted rubbish, but I'll believe it when I see for myself, instead of walking around in the smell of soot after every designated combustible rubbish day. The thing about paper cartons too is that they generally always have some new pulp from freshly felled trees added in their manufacture, and that since they're not directly reused, there's an ongoing manufacturing and resource cost to keep the supply of new cartons up.

Communal rinsing of cartons presents its own can of worms too. Having the kids dip their hands in the same bucket of water that contains traces of a very rich microbial medium is just asking for trouble, at least in the eyes of a former lab scientist. This is particularly important in places where the kiddies may not have practiced washing their hands well enough yet. See my previous posts on catching nasty colds from elementary school kids for more perspective.

The reason I make an issue out of this is that the move to paper cartons is being marketed as an ecological advancement, when a deeper analysis reveals that the main motivation is financial streamlining more than any greater desire to save the planet. In the wider sense, I reckon the lesson here is that just because something has a green label on it, doesn't mean that it's ultimately better for the environment. We've got to consider as many factors in the whole process as possible and judge if a change from what was a pretty good system in this case to one which may ultimately do more harm than good. Transparency, dialogue and education are so much more important than we give them credit for, but it's just all too easy to take things for granted and believe whatever hype is put out there so that manufacturers can increase their margins, or take advantage of well-meaning consumers.

Think green, by all means, but do think, and think really hard.