Sticker Booklet

I’m perturbed about my mother and recycling. I’m even more frustrated by my inability to make these narratives come together under one roof. My mother is a homophobe. The U.S. exported 881849048.74 pounds of plastic waste alone in 2024.¹ What will I do for her?

There is nothing better than a ziplock bag for what a ziplock bag does. Momma will either grow to regret this part of herself or she won’t, and either of those situations is laden with plastiglomerate sadness. I don’t think I did it it the right way, when I called Momma to break the news of my homosexual engagement. “I know this is something we don’t see eye-to-eye on, but I want to give you a chance to mother through it.”

“What does that mean, BrierMae?”

I don’t know how a mother should celebrate the engagement of her only daughter, but I could send her the local solid waste management plan and pray for her on my way home. “Review of Available Technologies” on page one-hundred-and-five is disappointing at first glance. The County will not pursue alternative technologies to manage waste during this ten-year period, but “If advances in the above technologies occur, the County will reassess these opportunities during the next planning period.”²

Momma insists through this all that she loves me. Some of the 41887829.82 pounds of plastic sent to Indonesia from the United States for recycling is used to produce heat for factory tofu production.³ The microplastics not only contaminate the Tofu en masse, but also leach into a secondary protein source, free range eggs. Ash flows from the factories into the immediate neighborhoods where chickens forage for their food as self-sustaining livestock. While the sample size of eggs tested in Tropodo is small, just three, I wept over the results for nearly as many days. It was found the dioxin level in Tropodo eggs is the second-highest level ever measured in Asia. The highest levels were measured at Bien Hoa in Vietnam, a former US Army Airbase made infamous by its violent Agent Orange contamination. An adult eating just one egg from a free-range chicken foraging in the vicinity of tofu factories in Tropodo would exceed the European Food Safety Authority tolerable daily intake for chlorinated dioxins by 70-fold.⁴

I’ll propose before March next year, when my very first niece is due to join us. I dote on every sonogram. I cannot wait to take her to the transfer station, and eventually the landfill. I know there is an age when forever burning methane flames is fascinating, even if only for the brightness and the smell. When I was child there were three Rs to learn (Reuse, Reduce, Recycle), but now there is commonly a fourth or as many as nine.⁵ My favorite new addition to the catechism is Rethink.

“It’s an unholy and twisted and disgusting thing, BrierMae. Well, I don’t mean I think you’re disgusting, but I do.”

The veil is thin as I determine how to restructure waste management in my home. I freeze white beans and broth in hand-me-down buckle jars instead of transparent baggies. I anxiously differentiate between the card-board reuse pile and the card-board recycling pile. I try to find a way to re-use single use food packaging that will not give my partner cancer. I have not been successful yet.

1. https://www.ban.org/plastic-waste-project-hub/trade-data/usa-export-data-annual-summary ↩︎
2. https://www.tompkinscountyny.gov/files/assets/county/v/1/recycling-and-materials-management/documents/final_tompkins_county_lswmp-id-3296007.pdf ↩︎
3. The study cited below actually suggests the source of plastic burned at Tropodo factories is plastic contaminants removed from paper recycling imports, and not directly from the plastic recycling chain. This would mean the tons burned in Tropodo are not included in the aforementioned statistic, but are in addition to it: https://www.ban.org/plastic-waste-project-hub/trade-data/usa-export-data-annual-summary ↩︎
4. https://ipen.org/sites/default/files/documents/indonesia-egg-report-v1_9-web.pdf ↩︎
5. https://www.circularise.com/blogs/r-strategies-for-a-circular-economy ↩︎