The Disconnect That’s Been Bothering Me

As anyone who follows my blog or my Twitter or my Facebook knows, I went to California this past summer.

The San Francisco Bay Area is where I lived for ten years before I emigrated to Belfast. This summer, thanks to my mom, we stayed in a beautiful holiday home in Berkeley, not too far from where my brother and his family live.

Since we were staying in a house we, obviously, had to do basic cleaning/garbage/recycling for the two weeks we were there.

And Berkeley’s recycling rules are a bit mind boggling. They do plastic, paper, glass and food. And each of these things have their own collection bin in the house to put into a ‘split bin’ on the curb on pick up day.

City of Berkeley curbside split bin. (1)

Obviously, all of this recycling costs money. The city apparently makes money from the recycling but I would imagine it is also part of property tax that my brother and all the residents pay, just as we pay Council Tax.

So the residents of Berkeley are really into saving the planet. Good for them.

However, I was stunned by the number of homeless people I saw around the city.

And a quick Google of ‘Berkeley homeless’ finds article after article of the persecution of these people, including one from this past December on the city throwing away the possessions of some of these homeless people. At the last homeless census, in 2011 (2), there were 4,341 homeless people in Alameda County and in 2009, about 680 of them lived in Berkeley.

That same article says that the city has a budget of $2.8m for helping the homeless with $1m of that going to direct services and that no one believes there are only 680 homeless in Berkeley.

To be fair, it also says the homeless numbers across the county are dropping, but that there just isn’t enough money to help everyone at the local level.

Meanwhile, the recycling plant is making $5m (3) a year to do more recycling.

I am certainly no economic expert in any way. Nor do I claim to understand the ins and outs of homelessness in the US.

But it sure seems to me that Berkeley would better serve everyone if they stopped worrying quite so much about the planet and started worrying a little bit more about the people who live on it.

Of course, I am also doubtful that those split bins make a difference anyway, since it all seems to go into one truck. Now, the truck could be split on the inside, although I can’t imagine what sort of mechanism could be sure to only place, for example, metal to the left and paper to the right. There has to be a human in there somewhere. Which costs money as well.

It should also be noted that, in some ways, I think recycling is the biggest myth and fairy tale perpetuated on the world anyway. How much energy does it take to recycle one can? What kind of fuel does that recycling take? What’s the carbon emission of all those extra trucks driving around?

I’m sure all of those things can be answered.

But I doubt anyone really wants to know what the answers are, much preferring to feel good about ‘saving the planet’.

By the way, I’m fairly sure the planet will be just fine.

The human race, on the other hand…

(1)credit: City of Berkeley Recycling

(2) source: Homeless Census

(3) source: Berkeley Recycling