Do you all remember when you bought that Hydro Flask that is sitting somewhere in your kitchen right now? In 2019, popular culture saw a tremendous increase in climate and environmental activism. As unfortunate as it would be to call it a “trend,” in many ways it already has been. I cannot recall the last time a woman on my TikTok For You Page showed me where I could take my mason jars to buy pasta to avoid single-use packaging. All jokes aside, there are many reasons why the ordinary person has become discouraged in their personal eco-friendly and recycling strides, causing the rapid social decline of this “trend.”
A worry that I have always had, which is shared by many others, is that household recycling put out for collection does not end up in the hands, or the facilities, that it is said to. It’s not an irrational worry. In 2022, only 9% of plastic waste used by Americans was successfully recycled. In 2024, it was reported that only 24% of recycled materials were actually recycled. The rest of it was lost to landfills, incinerated (yikes — the ozone!) or left polluting the environment. On top of that, the recycling and manufacturing facilities that we trust to handle the byproducts are not required to provide information on what precisely happens with the recycling brought in. There are surely plenty of products being made with these new recyclable materials, yet we still do not know how much is being reused and how much is displaced.
The blame isn’t only on the “system”: Americans aren’t recycling! In 2018, the plastic recycling rate was a whopping 8.7%, which decreased to 5% by 2021. Even at its most “popular,” the push to recycle did not see great results. Most New Yorkers should be familiar with the intricacies of sorting and recycling, but nothing is safe from simple human errors, leading to many items that could have been recycled being discarded, since they were plastic water bottles that ended up in a paper-recycling facility, which will now end up in a landfill.
For these reasons, I have always felt scorned by the recycling processes in my home. No one casually taking care of the recycling in their home is going to think that their individual or household efforts are making any kind of statistically significant, below-the-p-value, difference in the environment. Fordham even does a good bit of the work for us, with campus housing providing all the necessary, various waste recycling receptacles. Even so, there is not enough confidence in students to be washing their yogurt containers and removing the foil lid, nor confidence that the recycling will end up where it’s supposed to. In my experience, many don’t even know that it could cause recycling issues.
All of this considered, it is important not to let our spirits drop and to continue in our individual efforts to keep our planet clean. There is word that global efforts have contributed to an ever-so-slight healing in the ozone layer as of Sept. 16, and have projected that the large hole discovered over the Antarctic could be healed to its former state by 2066. No matter how small, all contributions and efforts are appreciated, needed and helpful in this extremely real crisis. Continue to bring your mason jars around, continue to fill up your Stanley from your BRITA! And, from one anxious student to the next, we would be making a much scarier world for ourselves by not trying.
Caitlin Wong, FCRH ’27 is a psychology and English Major from Union, N.J.
