How It’s Unmade

Creating environmental problems is easy, but undoing them is hard

George Dillard
5 min readSep 21, 2024

--

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

When they were little, my kids always used to love watching a show called “How It’s Made.” Unlike a lot of what they wanted to watch, I liked the show, too. If you’re a parent, you know how rare that is!

If you’ve never seen it, “How It’s Made” is an almost hypnotically no-frills show about, well, how things are made. Each episode goes through the industrial processes involved in crafting everything from corrugated plastic drain pipes to breath mints. The camera slowly pans across the factory, while a deadpan narrator explains what’s happening over Muzak-style background music. It’s both fascinating — bet you’ve never thought about how machines count out the right number of mints for each package before — and somehow soothing.

I was thinking about “How It’s Made” the other day when I went to drop off some of my plastic waste at a local center for hard-to-recycle items. The center takes a lot of the things that our curbside recycling won’t — electronics, berry clamshells, denim, and styrofoam — and makes sure that they actually get recycled. The place was a hive of activity as recyclers and volunteers sorted and, in some cases, deconstructed items to make sure they’d get recycled.

--

--