The truth about reciclying

The other day, as a procrastination exercise, I cleaned up the desk at my office. The job consisted, essentially, in throwing away many drafts of my papers and organizing some other people's papers, for future reference. My desk now is quite tidy, and I am proud of myself. I ended up throwing into the bin approximately 1500 pages, among preprints and handwritten sheets. How come so many pages? It turns out that while producing a paper (and especially when a deadline approaches) I tend to print a lot of versions of the current draft---more or less, one draft per day---so after submitting I end up with ten or more copies of the same work. There is also the issue that I have problems reading from the screen, and prefer to read something by printing it and making annotations on the paper.

So I am pretty much unable to do ecological research. I always remember Alan, who is quite an ecological guy in his research: he hardly prints anything, he gets cool software tools so as to do everything directly on his laptop, and, perhaps most importantly, he seems to be quite consistent in these habits. He doesn't even use the air conditioning in his office, although this is a more arguable point. I wish I could be more sensitive in this issue; I tell myself that nothing is better than actual paper, and how annoying is reading from the screen. Still, I am unable to change my habits. I don't feel bad at all. The reason is very simple: recycling is useless.

Of course recycling is a very reasonable idea, in principle. However, I have come to realize that in the current state of the world, it is a rather useless effort. That is to say, the state of our planet is so critical that individual efforts (such as separating your trash, our concrete contribution to recycling) end up being essentially useless. We need more decisive actions, both from individuals and governments. Here's a simple idea: if wasting trees and paper is a problem, then a truly determinate action would be adding huge taxes on paper and ink so as reduce their consumption (and hence, their waste). Just like what some scandinavian countries do with alcohol. Wasting paper is just so easy, as paper is cheap and nobody cares about buying more. It is easy to think of similar ideas in other settings.

Needless to say, individual actions such as separating you trash are positive. We should continue doing them while bearing in mind that they're little effective---the overall sum of little efforts is still too small in the context of the problem. I have realized more clearly the environmental problems we are facing after visiting the US. It was shocking to me to see the different sense of proportion people have there. Distances are so huge; your social success seems to be represented by the size of your car. Sadly, waste also comes in absurd proportions. It seems to me that the positive environmental actions of an average European family in a week (separating thrash, riding bikes, using public transportation) are lost by the negative effects of a single American SUV which is used the whole day.

There is also the point of people feeling good about themselves when doing ecological efforts. That's a different story, though.