Of all the Saturday morning cartoons, Captain Planet was by far the best. What could possibly beat an environmentally conscious Patrick Swayze look-a-like who promised to "take pollution down to zero?"
His solar-powered Geo Cruiser was much cooler than the Batmobile, and Captain Planet's superhero outfit with matching epaulets trumped Superman's flimsy red cape any Saturday morning.
Penn could sure use a superhero when it comes to tackling its own eco-villain: non-recycled waste. Among its peer institutions in the Ivy League, Penn recycles the lowest share of its garbage - just under 12 percent. Some schools, like Cornell University, recycle up to 57 percent of waste, and all of Penn's peer institutions in the Ivy League recycle nearly twice as much. We can buy 40 million kilowatts of wind power a year, but we still can't take care of our own garbage.
But, however poorly Penn is doing, the city of Philadelphia is doing much worse.
According to Evan Belser of RecycleNOW Philadelphia, only 6 percent of the city's waste is actually recycled. The national average, in comparison, hovers around 32 percent, an EPA study found.
"We have one of the worst residential recycling programs in the country," Belser said.
The situation is so bad that the city was called out last year for violating its own recycling regulations. According to a report by former city controller and current mayoral candidate John Saidel, the city failed to systematically set up curbside recycling programs.
In response to an institutional resistance to recycling, the group RecycleNOW Philadelphia has stepped in to fill the void by implementing its own pilot curbside recycling program that pays people back for recycling their waste. In the neighborhoods where the program has been piloted, response rates rose by up to 90 percent.
"The program does exactly what we want in an extremely effective manner," Belser said.
In light of these successes, the city's relative inertia against improving its poorly designed recycling programs is hard to justify.
From a taxpayer's standpoint, recycling makes sense. Literally.
According to Saidel's report, for every 1-percent increase in the recycling rate, taxpayers may save $450,000 annually. Recyclable materials can even be sold to area recycling companies at a profit. "We're literally throwing money in the garbage," Belser said.
In a classic episode, Captain Planet and the five Planeteers take on Sly Sludge, an arch-eco-villian with an aversion to the three Rs of environmental stewardship: reduce, reuse and recycle. When Captain Planet tells Sludge that recycling waste can actually be the thrifty thing to do, Sludge is converted into a recycling enthusiast overnight.
Perhaps there's a lesson here for Mayor Street and his administration. Just imagine how Philadelphia could use the money it would save by recycling: Investing in better public housing, an efficient public transit system or even a real department dedicated to environmental protection.
The city has never had an official position or department devoted to environmental sustainability. Instead, it has a dummy Office of Environmental Health that takes care of problems as varied as rat extermination, the West Nile virus, food poisoning, unsanitary swimming pools and barbershop licenses. I never knew so many things but "environmental health" could even fall under the same category.
Much like the city government, Penn has no environmental-protection programs, no environmental-sustainability policy and no one in charge of implementing environmental-stewardship policies.
"If Penn has any environmental policy, it's a mystery to me," Environmental Science professor Robert Geigengack said.
Last Monday's initiative by the Undergraduate Assembly to champion a comprehensive environmental policy at Penn was a step in the right direction. Here and in City Hall, we're making some inroads, but students and citizens must continue to push for ongoing changes.
As the city and the University come to face similar problems, they should work together to develop successful models of environmental sustainability. As Captain Plant says, "The power is yours!"
Elizabeth Song is a College sophomore from Clemmons, N.C. Her e-mail address is song@dailypennsylvanian.com . Striking a Chord appears on Thursdays.
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