Zoey Kroll, Internet Communications Coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment;
Robert Reed, Public Relations Manager of Recology;
Jack Macy, Zero Waste Coordinator, City of San Francisco
Lady and Gentlemen:
Greetings to two fellow members of the Professional Organization of English Majors, and the third, unprivileged wretch. I hope your pestilence is as pleasant as it can be, and that this finds you well.
I write to notify you of a great concern: your transmissions in the Great Psychic Environmental Program are not working.
Allow me to explain. A twenty year resident of the City, and ardent environmentalist, I was but one of many who cheered as San Francisco radically reduced its waste by having a recycling and composting bin available to each resident, thus ceasing the ludicrous practice of shoving into the ground that which could in one case be used to grow new food and drink for us all, and in the other, be readily reused. When I visit relatives and friends in other towns, I note that many other municipalities still don't even mandate the most modest recycling efforts.
About every five years as an apartment dweller, I receive a mailing outlining recycling procedures, but other than that, as for all information we seek, I must rely on internet search findings, as none of your respective departments reach my eyes and ears via any single major news and information source, from Twitter, to Facebook, to KQED, to the San Francisco Chronicle. Indeed, I can't recall receiving a single instruction as to what may be recycled other than the sticker on the bins, and that every-few-years mailing.
And some aren't as caring as am I: don't even get me started on finding plastic bags in the compost, and styrofoam filling the recycling bin. Except mysteriously when that guy on the third floor is on vacation.
When I did use a search engine on that internet thing to learn what plastics are permissible (the main material with which our species is killing our planet), this is what I found:
https://sfenvironment.org/which-plastics-are-recyclable-in-sf.
On said page, readers are encouraged to "Please bundle clean soft plastic into one bag and place in the blue recycling bin," which raises two questions: which residents actually do that (is it more than six people, two of which have OCD?), and how are they supposed to know to do it, since presumably not many are receiving said psychic transmissions. Secondly, I just learned that the blue part is a link, taking one to a page full of information about what IS recyclable: https://sfrecycles.org.
Of course, you recycling professionals know that this is ridiculous on several levels. First, it encourages what one wit dubbed "aspirational recycling." When on Earth Day I posted a short video asking people to consider how much single use plastics they are generating, and to pick three creators of products they like and gently, repeatedly encourage them to find another way for the generators of the waste bring their products to market, a friend wrote saying that she just puts all her plastics in the recycling bin.
Imagine her surprise when I sent her this radio story about what becomes most of the plastic: Where Your Plastic REALLY Goes. Yep, it burns it heaps in poor countries: shocking, as this never happens with any other problem we industrialized countries don't want to deal with and export to countries that just can't say "no," as they possess neither navies nor nuclear warheads to aid their polite refusal.
Given that we are not receiving your GPEP transmissions, could you please respond here as to what precisely happens with each of these different kinds of plastics I have photographed below?
We repurpose it, it is bundled with others of its kind and blah blah blah doesn't tell us what we naturally want to know: seriously, what becomes of the objects I have photographed to learn more? In just a month, I alone generated several grocery bags of plastic, despite my best pre-cycling efforts.
Despite your failings as transmitters of psychic energy to instruct residents on how to recycle, and what becomes of recycled objects, you all three do important work, and of course are hampered by policies you don't dictate. Nonetheless, it falls to you to instruct the City's denizens on how and what to do, and teach us what becomes of our efforts.
Thank you in advance for your cooperative, collective response. Again, what precisely becomes of each of these single-use plastics, and what will you do to change your outreach to better educate residents?
Kevin A. Madden, M.A.Ed.
POEM
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