Trash your doubts, recycle

I have never encountered a Duke student with strong feelings about napkin color. No one has ever said to me, “I like white napkins because they allow me to view the brilliant color of my food stains.” Surprising, right?

So maybe you haven’t noticed that brown napkins are popping up all over campus. In fact, Duke will soon require all dining locations to use unbleached, 100 percent recycled serviettes as part of a new sustainability initiative, the same one that ousted Styrofoam in 2014. This strategy is indicative of a broader tendency toward a greener university that includes increased availability of recycling and composting locations and promotion of locally grown products. Duke has increased the ease of sustainable living and now just needs some minimal effort from the student body.

Personally, I don’t have premonitions of environmental catastrophe every time I toss crumpled notes into a green bin, but it just feels wrong to throw paper in the trash. Maybe most Duke students are the same—they recycle or don’t out of habit. It’s easy to dismiss the abundance of well-labeled receptacles as a banal aspect of campus life, but a peek into the broader implications of sustainability initiatives can lend some potency to the issue.

For instance, did you know that the recycling industry employs over 1.1 million US citizens? According to the 2002 National Recycling Economic Information Study, it has a payroll of almost $37 billion and grosses over $236 billion in annual revenues. Furthermore, recycling contributes to job growth and creates positions that generally pay above the average national wage, many of which are located in work-starved urban areas. Plus, the life of a plastic bottle doesn’t end at the recycling plant. Instead of being stowed away in a landfill and rendered dead to the world, it continues to have commercial value and can be utilized by companies that manufacture and distribute recycled products. Really, it’s a win-win scenario.

Take, for example, the brown napkins that now populate Duke’s eateries. They’re sourced from paper that was given a second life by recycling infrastructure, materials that passed through the hands of materials sorters, truck drivers, sales representatives, process engineers and chemists. Someone facilitated their creation just by tossing paper in the recycling bin.

It’s helpful to remember the environmental importance of recycling as well as its economic significance. According to the EPA, waste reduction and recycling can cut CO2 emissions by 345 million tons per year – a hefty dent, to say the least. Despite this opportunity, there will always exist those recycling naysayers who question recycling’s effectiveness. We can decrease CO2 emissions, but will we? After all, what is the significance of a paper napkin in the face of global climate change?

In my own experience, I find that sometimes the more you learn about environmental issues the more hopeless you become. We’ve already released gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so what impact can an individual have in the face of such catastrophe? Will we have to revert to a hunter-gatherer existence in order to significantly diminish CO2 emissions, and if we’re not going to fully commit, why even try? That, my friend, is the slippery slope to pessimism and indifference.

I know that most Duke students are familiar with environmental issues, but I think it’s easy to begrudge sustainable efforts when you won’t be able to follow through completely, especially when an individual contribution seems miniscule in the face of seven billion Earth inhabitants. But it’s okay. Not every part of your life needs to be completely sustainable and “green”—mine isn’t either, not even close.