Wannabe Environmentalist: Recycling Gender Wars

When my husband and I were first dating, he casually tossed an empty Red Bull can into a recycling bin in front of his coworker friends—and immediately got roasted for it.

“Whoa, whoa, since when do you recycle? Is your new girlfriend making you save the sea turtles, Captain Planet? You gonna trade your Mustang for a Prius now?”

When my husband told me this story, my first thought (after a short fit of unnecessary internal rage) was, Since when is caring about the environment gender-specific? If there’s anything I learned from being a 90’s kid watching environmental PSAs: both boys and girls needed to do their part to prevent forest fires, follow the three R’s of recycling, and cut plastic soda rings like the fishes depended on it.

I may have been only 9-years old living in the desert, but I would have been darned if I were to let a single plastic soda ring slip into the ocean without thoroughly snipping it first.

See, if my husband’s coworkers had been fortunate enough to watch Recycle Rex—a 1993 Disney short film where sporty dinosaurs sing about recycling trash—they would have learned, like me, that recycling is not tied to one gender or even one species. Recycle Rex got all his prehistoric pals on the “Reuse, reduce, recycle” bandwagon by singing a catchy song, even with his obvious disadvantage of having stubby T-Rex arms.

Looking back, I’m not sure if all those environmental videos I watched in elementary school were meant to be an educational part of our curriculum or just an animated guilt-trip that we could take home to our parents. And it probably didn’t help that most of those save-the-earth lessons came with eight-page packets we had to fill out before skipping to the lunchroom to scarf down microwave chicken nuggets on styrofoam trays.

But back to the real question at stake: am I really the one who wears the recycled pants in the relationship? I always assumed I was more earth-conscious than the average American, what with my background in 90’s cartoon environmentalism. But it wasn’t until meeting my husband that I realized, I kind of suck at recycling.

Here I was patting myself on the back when my recycle bin was filled to the brim with Amazon boxes, while my husband was going beyond the amateur scope of box recycling to single-handedly deliver an empty Starbucks bottle to a public glass recycle bin. And that’s not all. He wears the same few pairs of jeans until they’ve basically disintegrated. And he saves all of his previous cell phones in a box. All of them.

I was praising myself for slinging cardboard and he was over there on some next-level minimalism.

To be honest, I was pretty bummed when this newfound reality hit me. I kind of felt like I had let myself, the planet, and Recycle Rex down. (You know you’re in a bad spot when you feel like you’ve let someone down who’s been extinct for millions of years.)

But instead of feeling defeated, I took it as an opportunity to challenge myself and become more aware of what I could do to be better.

So I did. While I continue to reassess my recycling habits, I have to say that I’ve improved a lot over the years, and being married to Mr. Corporate Captain Planet only makes me more accountable.

But it all seems silly, doesn’t it? In today’s world where, according to a recent study by the University of Georgia, an estimated 8-million metric-tons of plastic goes into the ocean each year, recycling is one of the seemingly effortless jobs we can do for our planet. And yet, the act of not putting in the effort seems to be the social norm.

These are all things to think about as we work together to improve our planet. And for the record, my husband traded in his Ford Mustang for a Ford F150, not a Prius, so maybe that’s our next battle to fight.