Baltimore setting an example with trash
July 30, 2008
When I moved to Baltimore in 2006, I was put off by an exchange with a carryout clerk in Charles Village. I had finished off a bottle of soda or iced tea or something, and I asked where I should put the bottle so it could be recycled.
The gentleman looked at me as if I had asked him to do a chore like mop the kitchen of my apartment or feed my fish. He pointed to the garbage can. “So that’s how it is here,” I thought. I’ve never really seen anything to change that view. The opportunities to recycle anywhere seem basically limited to a biweekly visit from the city’s public works department, though I have seen faithful participation around my neighborhood on that front.
So imagine my surprise today when I read the Washington blog DCist, which reports that Baltimore recycles a “very respectable 42 percent” of its refuse.
That beats Washington (22), Philadelphia (38) , New York (34), and Boston — where I came from (15). San Francisco recycles 69 percent of its waste! DCist gets its figures from a New York Times article and from the trade publication Waste News.
“It’ll be a dark day in a garbage-filled hell before Baltimore and Philadelphia can tell us how to deal with refuse,” the unimpressed DCist writes.
The Times article says recycling has been pushed by increasing public awareness campaigns in cities. I wonder how much Mayor Sheila Dixon’s Cleaner Greener Baltimore push has to do with our showing.
ANDY ROSEN, Business Writer
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It doesn’t really matter that DCist is incapable of learning, that’s it’s problem. But your ignorance can be explained as an example of one of the most common errors in empirical thinking generally, that of generalizing from a single data point. The Charles Village carryout clerk fixed your view that Baltimore doesn’t recycle and from that point on you analyzed all other data you came across from the perspective of what Behavioral Decision Theory (or Behavioral Economics) would call a “confirmatory bias.” A good course in empirical methods would solve your problem. It is generally accepted that judgment biases of this sort can be overcome with education and practice. It’s never been clear to me why Record employees consistently use this blog to describe their intellectual and educational shortcomings. Is it a new journalistic style for the internet age?