About 25 years ago (gosh has it been
that long), I worked with some conscientious people particularly Marsha and
Jane. Marsha was director then of Community Action Agency in our small town and
Jane was a bright community educator. At that time recycling meant haul your
big appliance discards to the steel recyclers near the city dump for a little
cash back, or get a few bucks for that end-of-the-line car.
At the same time, during the 1980s, the
chemical industry began presenting the consumer with a flood of plastic
containers. We seemed to be suddenly inundated with plastics. The image of
Dustin Hoffman’s wide-eyed Graduate
taking advice from a business elder was correct – “one word,” the elder said in
that classic film, “Plastics.”
Marsha found a small grant to get
household recycling at our local refuse center. Recycling required public
education and close work with the municipal garbage collection. The concept of
curbside recycling was still years away. Jane took on the task of encouraging
folks to separate their recyclables and bring them to the Recycle Center. We
even had a little radio ad,
“Come
on down to the re cycle center,
the re cycle center is the place to go. . .”
So, how are we doing with recycling
since those days? Well, curbside recycling in most communities is helping;
reuse of products have increased; even the production of products, particularly
the plastics industry is apparently working toward less toxic, easier break
down (vegetable based) of the final piece of plastic. We live near the campus
of Michigan State University which is the size of a moderate city (48,000
students). Here dozens of situations are addressed by recycling and alternative
energy use including the popular MSU Surplus Store where you can buy just about
anything from a college campus.
The MSU recycle center takes almost any
non-food item except Styrofoam and electrics. Solar panels on the overhead
lights secure the area, even the parking lot is designed to collect rainwater. Because
this is a research university, valuable data is also part of the plan.
How are we doing? I’m still worried,
especially since the number of consumers has doubled since our little effort
back then. It seems folks continue to buy lots of small plastic consumable
products particularly for children and when empty, throw them in the garbage;
several states still refuse to offer returnable bottle collection, multiple
housing complex garbage collections are overloaded with cardboard boxes (easy
to recycle) stuffed with Styrofoam (not so easy). One 3000 passenger cruise
ship produces 8 tons of waste in one
week
How are we doing? Oh my, consider the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific gyre (Wikipedia). A “patch” of
undeterminable items from nets and cruise ship garbage to a gazillion plastic
bags – the whole thing is big, bobbing there in the waves, possibly, (are you
sitting down?), the size of the continental United States. Good grief.
What can we possibly do to stem the tide (pun intended) of our
consumption and by-products? I guess work hard at being a conscientious
consumer: bring your own washable bags for groceries (380 billion plastic bags
a year are dumped by Americans), think about what will happen to the products we
buy and eventually dispose of, teach our children by modeling a planet love
conscience (it is the only home we have), encourage community recycling/reuse
measures, and maybe join an earth caring organization.
Our little back to the land decade
described in A Homestead Decade, How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life, taught
us much about a low impact – canning, heating, conservation, making our own,
but today, such a life style would be very difficult especially if we care
about our collective lives on the planet.
Thanks
for stopping by
Love,
Helene
