Around this time of year, in the throes of the great high feast of our consumerist faith, I often find myself thinking of compulsive hoarders, and of their strange relationship to that consumerism. There’s an American reality TV show called Hoarders, which has been running on the A&E Network for more than 15 years, and which depicts the lives and struggles of people who suffer from compulsive hoarding disorder. As is customary for such shows, Hoarders drapes a threadbare veil of mental-health concern across its naked voyeurism; it has been on the air since 2009 not because its viewers have empathy for those who suffer from this particular disorder – entangled, as it typically is, with such conditions as serious depression, anxiety and OCD – but because they are morbidly fascinated by the grim spectacle of such lives. Such people exist as though buried alive in the accumulated detritus of their own days.
But what strikes me about these blighted souls is that they are, in some sense, consumer capitalism’s Madwoman in the Attic: the dark, deranged doppelgängers of our apparently rational selves.
Every day, several times per day, I make purchases that involve leaving some object in my wake – a wrapper or a cup here, a crushed plastic package or a bag there. Usually, I will deposit such items in a recycling bin on the street if I am out and about, or otherwise in the recycling bin in my kitchen. Every Sunday evening, I dutifully wheel my green wheelie bin out on to the street, filled with the accumulated trash of the week, in the vague understanding that it will be taken away early the following morning, brought to some kind of processing centre where it will be properly sorted, before being taken somewhere else to be recycled.
The idea here, the article of indistinct faith, is that all these items will somehow be brought back to life in some other form, in a great transmigration of trash. What was once a disposable razor will return, in the next life, as a plastic water bottle; that plastic bottle, in turn, will reappear some day as part of the door handle of a fully-electric Volvo SUV (or whatever). Frankly, I have no idea how any of it is supposed to work. What matters, in the end, is not how (or whether) the process works, but that I have played my own small but crucial role within it – that I have, as we say, “done the recycling”.
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And there is, surely, something delusional about this belief, something perhaps even a little insane. My strong suspicion is that recycling is little better than an empty ritual, which exists to sustain the mass delusion of sustainable consumption. Plastic, which is made from petroleum and gas among other substances, is notoriously difficult to recycle. For one thing, all of the many chemically distinct types of plastic must be carefully separated and sorted, because recycling them together is not possible – obviously a difficult and expensive process. There is, too, a limit to the number of times a plastic can be recycled, because the materials degrade with each reuse; typically, it’s only possible to reuse a plastic once or twice.
The truth is, the vast majority of plastic is not recycled. Globally, 85 per cent of plastic material winds up in landfills; about 400 million tonnes of plastic waste gets added to the pile every year. The plastic that doesn’t make it to those landfills gets swept into rivers, or directly into the ocean. It gets broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, called microplastics, which are eaten by fish and other marine creatures. We know that every single one of us has microplastics in our bloodstreams; we have not even begun to properly understand what this material is doing to us.
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This year, the US-based Center for Climate Integrity published a detailed report entitled The Fraud of Plastic Recycling. “Despite their long-standing knowledge that recycling plastic is neither technically nor economically viable, petrochemical companies – independently and through their industry trade associations and front groups – have engaged in fraudulent marketing and public education campaigns designed to mislead the public about the viability of plastic recycling as a solution to plastic waste,” wrote the report’s authors. The widespread emphasis on and adoption of recycling has allowed the plastic market to expand, while stalling legislative and regulatory action that might otherwise have mitigated plastic waste and pollution.
The process is, in some respects, similar to that taken by oil companies with the idea of the individual “carbon footprint”. In the early 2000s, the marketing and PR firm Ogilvy and Mather was hired by British Petroleum to promote the idea that climate change was to be blamed not on large corporations, but on individuals and their consumer choices. They came up with something called a “carbon footprint calculator”, encouraging consumers to assess how their daily lives – travelling, shopping, going to and from work – contributed to heating the planet.
The logic here is one of displacement, of shifting culpability for environmental devastation away from massive corporations – whose shareholders and executives make immense profits from the extraction of fossil fuels – on to individual consumers. And so too with recycling: a fake individual solution to a very real collective problem. As an idea, it facilitates the endless production of plastic trash.
In this sense, recycling also has something in common with innovations in the tobacco industry – filtered cigarettes, “light” cigarettes – introduced to counter the effects of growing public awareness of the links between smoking and cancer. Instead of quitting smoking altogether, smokers switched to filtered cigarettes, in the belief that they were mitigating the harm caused by tobacco.
And so if compulsive hoarders, in their obsessive refusal to relinquish even the most trivial possession, appear to us sad and strange figures, it is partly because they represent an unsettling reflection of our own consumer selves. They are like the portrait kept locked up and out of sight by Dorian Gray, on whose painted face the accumulated evidence of a decadent life becomes more and more ugly, more and more terrible. The apparent madness of their refusal to throw anything away is really a nightmarish representation of what we refuse to see about ourselves, and our way of life.