Where Do You Think “Away” Is?

On NIMBYism, waste, recycling myths, quiet arrogance, and the strange psychology of pretending consequences live somewhere else.

Modern civilization may have accidentally invented a religion.

Not Christianity. Not capitalism. Not politics.

Something stranger.

Something so normalized we rarely notice it operating beneath our lives.

It is the religion of Away.

We throw things away. We flush things away. We move problems away. We relocate discomfort, inconvenience, smell, noise, visible poverty, industrial necessity, and civic unpleasantness somewhere else. Landfills go away. Wastewater goes away. Shelters go away. Mental health facilities go away. Recycling centers go away. Rail yards go away. Affordable housing goes away. Power generation goes away.

Consequences, preferably, go away too.

And somewhere along the line, western culture quietly convinced itself that “away” was a real place instead of a psychological trick.

Because here is the uncomfortable truth:

Away is usually just somebody else’s backyard.

Someone else’s air. Someone else’s water. Someone else’s declining property value. Someone else’s industrial corridor. Someone else’s asthma. Someone else’s inconvenience. Someone else’s child growing up next to the thing society insisted was necessary — but not near us.

That contradiction deserves scrutiny.

Not because people are evil.

Because comfort has a way of disguising arrogance.

And nowhere does that arrogance wear nicer clothes than in the philosophy of NIMBYism.

The Quiet Aristocracy of “Not Here”

NIMBY — Not In My Back Yard — sounds harmless at first. Reasonable, even. Nobody wakes up excited to live beside a landfill, shelter, wastewater facility, rail depot, scrapyard, treatment plant, affordable housing complex, or industrial transfer station. Noise, disruption, smell, congestion, and uncertainty make people nervous. That part is understandable.

The deeper question is harder:

If society genuinely needs these things, where exactly are they supposed to go?

And perhaps more importantly:

Who gets forced to live beside them?

Because this is where civic virtue often quietly transforms into something resembling aristocracy.

People who speak passionately about equity block housing density. People who advocate environmental responsibility oppose transit infrastructure. People who support mental health resources resist treatment facilities nearby. People who celebrate sustainability fight compost operations, recycling facilities, repair industries, salvage yards, and industrial reuse centers.

The language sounds compassionate.

The behavior becomes exclusionary.

The slogan is painfully familiar:

“We support it… just not here.”

There may be no sentence more revealing in modern civic life.

Because hidden inside those four words is an entire philosophy of outsourced inconvenience.

We support solutions, provided somebody else absorbs the cost. Provided another neighborhood changes. Provided another community accepts the smell, noise, density, traffic, disruption, or perceived decline. Preferably somewhere poorer. Somewhere politically weaker. Somewhere easier to ignore.

We speak passionately about community while quietly preserving personal insulation.

And the uglier truth?

We often congratulate ourselves for compassion while exporting responsibility.

The Commons We Keep Defiling

There was once an understanding — imperfect, but real — that healthy societies shared burdens alongside benefits.

Roads, waste systems, water infrastructure, transportation corridors, industrial zones, agriculture, energy systems, and public services existed inside a social contract. The commons mattered because everyone depended on them, even if nobody particularly loved every part of maintaining them.

Modern culture still talks about the commons.

We just increasingly expect someone else to maintain them.

Preferably invisibly.

We want food but resist nearby agriculture. We want electricity but oppose transmission lines. We want affordable homes but reject density. We want healthcare but resist treatment centers. We want recycling but not processing facilities. We want functional cities while opposing the infrastructure required to make cities function.

This is not merely hypocrisy.

It is civic immaturity.

Because adulthood — individually or collectively — eventually requires accepting uncomfortable realities.

Things smell.

Things rust.

Things break.

Things require maintenance.

Things require processing.

Things must be stored.

Things must be repaired.

Civilization itself is maintenance.

And maintenance is rarely aesthetic.

A healthy society does not merely consume beautiful outcomes. It learns to tolerate the practical realities required to create them.

The Recycling Religion

Nowhere is this contradiction more obvious than recycling.

To be clear:

Recycling matters. Conservation matters. Material recovery matters. Reuse matters. Salvage matters.

But modern recycling often functions less like a system and more like absolution.

Buy freely. Consume generously. Toss it into the blue bin. Feel morally cleansed.

The ritual feels comforting.

The reality is messier.

For years, wealthy nations quietly exported massive portions of recycling streams overseas, particularly to China, where materials were sorted, processed, reused — or discarded — under conditions most western consumers rarely saw. Then came China’s National Sword policy in 2018, sharply restricting contaminated imports and exposing something deeply inconvenient:

Much of modern recycling was built on fragile economics and geographic distance.

Plastic contamination rates remained high. Mixed materials proved difficult to process. Downcycling — transforming materials into lower-quality products rather than truly circular reuse — became increasingly common.

Some materials still matter tremendously:

Metals.

Industrial salvage.

Paper.

Glass in certain systems.

But plastics?

Plastics turned out to be far messier than the story we had been sold.

The uncomfortable truth is that recycling is not magic, and consumption does not become harmless because we sorted correctly.

Sometimes recycling has functioned less like stewardship and more like permission.

A cultural hall pass.

A psychological mechanism allowing us to keep consuming without confronting scale.

Without confronting waste itself.

Without asking the harder question:

Why are we producing so much disposable material to begin with?

Because waste, increasingly, is not accidental.

Waste is often the business model.

Planned obsolescence. Disposable furniture. Single-use convenience. Cheap electronics. Fast fashion. Temporary products engineered for replacement rather than repair.

GDP rewards throughput.

Not durability.

Not stewardship.

Not repairability.

Western civilization has become astonishingly comfortable treating waste as an acceptable percentage of growth.

The troubling part is not that waste exists.

The troubling part is how much of it we have normalized.