Overcoming Recycling Cynicism

Some of the most cynical statements I hear about recycling whenever I bring up obvious gaps seem to be quips from those tasked with getting people to recycle.

It can’t be an easy job, after all, especially if you consider that we still can’t get 23% of men, many dressed in impeccable business attire (up to a third of those attending expensive sports events,) to wash their hands after using public restrooms, or 61% of Americans to do so after coughing or sneezing.  So how do we get people to sort recyclables from trash?

The 2012 National Geographic Greendex Survey reveals that 47% of Americans say they always recycle vs. 22% who often recycle.

That is 9 percentage points more than the worldwide average but far less than the 64% of Canadians who always recycle and 19% who often recycle.

Applying the differential in the survey of those who believe they are green vs. their perceptions of others, the percentage of Americans who always recycle may be closer to 32% compared to Canadians at 37% so maybe some cynicism among those tasked with increasing participation is justified.

Here are more than a half dozen suggestions that can possibly help fuel greater recycling:

• Anyone selected to champion recycling should already have ample passion and determination along with a strong sense of mission along with a strong growth-orientation.  It will be essential to success and experts find it is almost impossible to instill these attributes in people once they are adults.

 

• To avoid being overwhelmed, focus on the perpetrators.  For instances, only 4% of the public are intentional litterers while 17% do so inadvertently, ironically the same percentage as those who are restroom dirt bags.  Coincidence?

That is most likely the same proportion who can’t be troubled to be diligent about placing items in the right container or give a damn that we’re rapidly running out of landfill.

 

• The biggest predictor of littering for the fifth of the population who does is the proximity to or lack of receptacles.  Recycling champions should take note and do everything possible to make recycling a reflex including proliferation of containers such as the ones shown in this blog at a Durham Library.

 

• A clear answer has never been forthcoming but no one seems to know how many Durham schools, public, private and charter have separate receptacles for trash and recycling similar to those shown at the library.  How can this value be embedded in adults if it isn’t abundantly clear and available to young people?

 

• Stop being timid about enforcement.  A Republican official and friend of mine believes the fixation his party has with regulations is paradoxically driven by the fact that so few are energetically enforced which leads to over tightening.

 

• Adopt consistent labels.  Recycling Across America has developed a set of clear labels that when tested in a study showed a 47% increase in recycling.

 

• Promote stores that have recycling bins, especially those that collect items not yet eligible for curbside, e.g. small batteries at the American Tobacco Complex and plastic bags at Regency Cleaners and Target.

I’ve become an avid recycler and part of the motivation has been a game I’ve played for years to see how small I can get my trash footprint each week compared to the amount in my recycling cart which is picked up every other week.  Now it has become a reflex.

The same could be done for a community by regularly reporting a simple scorecard showing the proportions of trash and recyclables on a per capita basis compared to past performance and goals.  The EPA has even developed a calculator that could be used to compute the energy savings.

For example, few residents in Durham, NC, where I live, seem aware that the per capita trash disposed has declined 14% over the past 10 years, far more than the state average and far better than the 45% increase in the average of averages for other urban counties.

Still we can learn from and be challenged by neighbors who are doing better including some in the Durham metro such as the record-setting Orange County.

I am sure there is a similar 10 year benchmark for recyclable recovery but I can’t put my hands on it.  Last year, Durham ranked just 28th out of 100 counties, up from 33rd the year prior at 121.12 lbs. and far short of the 300+ goal assigned by the state.

Boiling these out into monthly numbers and giving the entire community simple reports of how much we are transferring from trash to recycling seems to be an idea with merit.

Recycling is important but it can be fun and rewarding.  Analysis shows that a 75% diversion of trash and debris, such as that created by construction, by 2030 from municipal landfills, would create 2.3 million jobs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions equal to shutting down about 72 coal power plants and significantly improve our ecosystem.

Stockholm Syndrome And History’s Down Escalator

I am always surprised at the number of public administrators these days who appear to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological phenomenon where hostages begin to defend their captors.

Ask these individuals a question about a level of service or upkeep and they note how stretched they are for resources.  But when attempts are made to rally the electorate to motivate elected officials to provide the funding necessary to do the job right, these individuals almost always begin back peddling if not diving under the table.

There is definitely the impression that retribution is alive and well among civil servants and not just politicians, undermining more than a hundred years of civil service reform.

This behavior also enables elected officials and pundit enablers to gridlock measures popular with the general public.

In the electorate we are under the impression that administrators openly and passionately advocate within government for resources and services sufficient to do right by the public and publicly owned property and that the merits of these discussions find their way to elected officials where they are further examined and and help to create insight and inform decisions.

I fear that isn’t the way it is working in practice these days.  Public administrators seem far more willing to push back on the electorate with excuses about why things can’t be done properly than they are to advocate for what they need to get the job done.

Even if they aren’t silenced within agencies, in my experience they can be subject to interference and even threats by elected officials.

By-products of this dilemma are not only gridlock and less passionate advocates within agencies but a passive CYA culture when it comes to holding the line in the face of special interests or the now ubiquitous absence of strategic thinking.

In contravention of one of the 8 Qualities of Remarkable Employees public administrators who are passionately outspoken about their jobs today are often suppressed into silence for fear that they will be accused of rocking the boat or draw retribution from and even “scalp-hunting” from elected officials while those who are inept are given safe haven.

The result is that lobbyists and special interests have free reign over what was meant to be in the words of President Abraham Lincoln, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” while in the words of Hardin Tibbs month before last, both administrators and elected bodies in “democratic governments seem increasingly populist rather than strategic, and wait for electoral pressure before risking policy initiatives.”

Tibbs, a business consultant, eloquently blogged six months ago that we stand at the convergence of two major historical tendencies where “ascending upsides and descending downsides meet, converging in a fleeting moment of equal power, which pushes open the door of possibility to its widest extent.”

He continues that “Now is when our mere attitudes about the future can make a decisive difference.  Here is a tipping point in time where we can jump from the down escalator of history onto the up one.”

Tibbs argues that “Now the main risk is getting caught in the downdraft of pessimism, for here is an opening of maximum creativity.”

“The ideas we debate now will crystallize into the template of the era to come – the transmodern civilization being born.”

In my opinion, we need passionate public administrators, not just politicians, to be a part of that debate.

The Difference Between Intensity and Passion!

During the mid to late 1980s I went through something of a mid-career crisis.  I loved community-destination marketing, especially for mid-sized communities and I was good at it but circumstances at the time gave me reason to reassess and reaffirm.

I was drawing unsolicited attention from larger communities along with requests to see my resume.  At the same time I wondered if I was meant to stay on that career path just because I was successful and if so, would larger communities be as engaging and fulfilling?

My resume at the time was 10-15 years out of date so I sought advice from a friend who headed a very cutting-edge search firm and who had profiled me at one time as a template for communities seeking DMO execs. He started fresh by asking me to jot down a list of personal descriptors – and I still have a copy of that list today.

One term I listed was “intense” which he later crossed out and replaced with “passionate” a term I would come to hear used frequently during the last two decades of my now-concluded career in community-destination marketing.  I remember asking the late Don Clifton to tell me the difference.

He explained to me that the communities I had represented to that point in my career definitely knew the difference.  He described the difference much the same way Steve Moore, a fellow blogger, did a few weeks ago when he wrote that:

• “Intensity communicates, ‘I really want you to believe this.’ Passion communicates, ‘I really believe this.’
• Intensity is marked mostly by emotion; passion is marked mostly by conviction.
• Intensity is often packaged with hype; passion comes with authenticity.
• Intensity comes across as superficial; passion comes across as natural.
• Intensity is communicated by talking loudly; passion is communicated by talking plainly.
• There’s a place for intensity in leadership, but its no substitute for passion.”

Any success attributed to me, especially during my tenure in Durham, NC where I still live, is most often credited to being passionate.  But I also know that it was because I tapped into the deep vein of passion that runs through residents of this community and merely gave it voice and vision.

As measured through scientific polling, Durham residents are passionate about their community by a ratio of 15 to 1 compared to the national and North Carolina benchmark of 1 to 1.

Moore, who also writes about passion-fueled purpose in his book entitled Who Is My Neighbor?: Being a Good Samaritan in a Connected World, explains the power of the passion in Durham and in my leadership style as a weave of “the threads of interest-based and issue-based passion (coming) together to form an incarnational passion.”

My passion for Durham was disguised for many people by logic and data both because that is my dominate decision-making style and because, let’s face it, passion alone as a trigger can frighten many people, particularly those in business and government.

But in the words of semantic researcher Dr. Frank Luntz, “Passion sustains us…passion turns ordinary businesspeople into extraordinary fighters for a better future.”

In retirement I indulge a number of interest-based passions, some more intense than others, such as photography and motorcycles and reading and English Bulldogs and family and I still dabble in community sense of place and marketing.

But I have fused the latter two into an issue-based passion to preserve and promote the scenic character of my community and my adopted home state of North Carolina through Scenic North Carolina against threats such as outdoor billboards, above ground utility lines and other forms of scenic blight to public property.

These are powerful special interests but Luntz reminds us that “With enough money, you can buy almost anything—information and influence, access and acclaim. Yet without passion, you will not win no matter how much of anything you have.”

To add your passion to this struggle, email scenicnc@gmail.com.

Blessed By “Two Hearts On Fire”

One of my favorite country songs was first recorded in 1990, a year after I moved to Durham to jumpstart community/destination marketing here, a job from which I retired after more than two decades.

There are three reasons that Hugh Prestwood’s “Ghost In This House” resonates with me, both in the original version by Shenandoah and as interpreted a decade later by Alison Krauss.  On three occasions during my life, if only for a day or two, I’ve felt as low as the lyrics in this song describe but for other reasons three lines in particular resonate with me.

I’m just a whisper of smoke

I’m all that’s left of two hearts on fire

That once burned out of control

It also describes my parents relationship but, of course, I’m not all that’s left.  I have two incredible younger sisters.  We’re fortunate to be the children of two parents whom we now realize were and are (my Mom’s still living) incredibly passionate, strong-willed, full of life and laughter and ideas and who sacrificed so much for us.

By age 14, I knew they were burning out of control but they held on until I was on the backside of 30 and we were all of age with lives of our own before they went their separate ways.

The lyrics have another meaning for me.  They represent so many people I see who seem to sleep walk through life, afraid of their shadow, rarely if ever making a difference, sometimes barely disturbing the air through which they walk, like a “whisper of smoke.”

Over the years I’ve worked and dialogued at length with many of these souls who sadly never seemed to feel really passionate about anything, let alone fully engaged. Many were good workers, some weren’t but that didn’t stop me from futilely trying to breath fire into them.

Maybe they are trapped in a way articulated in another favorite song that was co-penned and recorded just a year after “Ghost In This House” by Travis Tritt and Jill Colucci, entitled “Anymore.”

Maybe lines from that song are really about a relationship with life such as “I can’t hide the way I feel…I can’t hold the hurt inside…I’m afraid of pretending…I’ve got to take the chance…If I expect to get on with my life…I’m tired of pretending I don’t love you anymore.”

I always thought I had picked up my passion, drive and sense of engagement through imitation from my parents, but from the seemingly inherent nature I see in my single-mom-healthcare lawyer daughter it seemed like these traits were inherited.

But maybe it is both/and, as Jim Taylor expresses in his new book, “…the new understanding of genetics, contrary to the old argument of nature versus nurture is nature via nurture.”

I’ve also learned that passion and engagement and drive seem mystical to those without those traits which is why they so often mistake them as anger or conflict or confrontation.  Sadly, as all children seem innately passionate and engaged, I’m certain at one time these people must have felt what researchers call “the flow” and then shut down at some point in their lives, maybe for the same reasons they seem to “fear failure.”

In his excellent book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink reviews scientific evidence that people who are passionate and engaged are motivated intrinsically because they were given an incremental vs. fixed mindset about intelligence that “prizes learning goals over performance goals,” something one of the researchers he cites, Dr. Carol Dweck reviews in detail in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Maybe Graham Nash got it right with another favorite of mine that he penned while with The Hollies of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” fame (that’s Elton John on piano) and later made famous with CSN&Y as Teach Your Children (for those who love pedal steel as much as I do, that’s Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead sitting in to give the song its distinctive sound.)

It doesn’t just fall on parents or grandparents or school teachers to embed the right mindset, it is the responsibility of each of us (including conservative inclined to finger-wagging) whenever we have contact with a child to, as the song says, “feed them on your dreams, the one they picked, the one you’ll know by.”

I know one thing for certain.  I’ve been fortunate to feel “the flow” for as long as I can remember and now even into retirement.  A good part of the credit goes to being blessed into the home of those “two hearts on fire.”