Me and the Recycle Bin
“What if everybody tossed just one candy wrapper on the ground?” I demanded as I insisted my sister pick up her discarded wrapper.
“Excuse me?” my mother asked, saliva mingled with toothpaste dripping down her chin, when I chastised her for leaving the water running. Who was this crazy liberal teacher that taught her daughter this stuff?
Chagrined, but not defeated, my efforts to save the earth continued.
After all, who will care for the earth if we do not? Even in Christianity, there is the implication that if God gave us this earth, we are supposed to take care of it. Eastern religions openly acknowledge this, but my Christian upbringing was a little sketchier on this subject. But is not “dominion,” in the ancient Biblical sense really “stewardship”? And, if so, when we meet God what will we have to say to us about how we have cared for this planet he has given us?
C.S. Lewis explained ownership using a child’s teddy bear. A spoiled three-year-old sees not the teddy bear that s/he loves and cherishes and owns as a companion, but rather as the teddy that is “mine to tear to pieces if I like.” How do we view “our Earth”? Is it something that we “own” and that we can tear to pieces if we like? Earth cannot take care of herself. She needs us to protect and, now, clean her. And one of the most basic things we can do is to recycle. Anyone can do it, and it can be done almost anywhere to some degree.
My husband and I got a garbage bag and used it for plastic milk cartons. We planned to put them in a recycle bin. We also kept a bag for tin cans and another for soda cans. It was the perfect plan. When the bags got full, we decided, we would haul them to a community bin. So, after the bags filled we called the town’s offices to find out where we could take them. No good. There were only paper options, serviced by a company located 45 miles away.
Disappointed, we took the bags to the large receptacle behind our apartment building instead. But before we tossed the bags into the yawning, yellow, trashed-filled maw of the dumpster, we took a good look. “That’s a lot of trash that doesn’t have to be trash,” I said.
It’s a familiar request, and a mantra that we hear over and over again: recycle. In fact, so many of us have heard it so many times that we just sort of tune it out and continue on with our lives. And, really, recycling is not a normal part of our lives. In some big cities recycling claims attention only because it intrudes itself in the form of mandatory programs. Intrudes? Yes. This is because our mindset is that sorting garbage is inconvenient and annoying. We don’t think of it as helping Mother Earth. I didn’t think of it that way until guilt overwhelmed me when I no longer had the option to recycle.
Most of us do not live in cities where curbside recycling is part of the city’s sanitation budget, and in those places, recycling is not even option because it doesn’t occur to the everyday citizen that it can be an option. Those who do consider the idea are stuck wondering if there is anything that can be done in a place where recycling just is not a priority. The first time I encountered such a quandary, I resigned myself and just saved paper, to be disposed of in the designated community bins. The thought that I was doing any good at all really didn’t occur to me.
In places of limited land availability, recycling is more important than in places where the dumps are found far from residences. After all, landfills have limited space, and nobody wants a garbage dump located near their house. I’ll never shake the image of my husband’s grandmother tossing a bag of her garbage at a city vehicle to protest the landfill scheduled to be built adjacent to her land. We take notice when garbage threatens our immediate area.
But in places where wide open spaces abound, the threat seems unreal, the product of some distant ‘environmental scare.’ But what happens when we decide to do a little exploring in the outdoors (camping or hiking or hunting) and we happen upon a refuse heap? That scenario is very likely in places where the land and sky seem to go on forever. While doing a little exploring of my own, I once hiked almost right into a site being used as an overflow dump. My stomach heaved at the smell and my spirit quailed at the display. So much beauty marred by filth. The fresh smell of the desert after the rain grotesquely overcome by the stomach-churning refuse. But the red cliffs are still present, and the clearing blue sky is peeking out. I tried to look at those features as I turned aside, but with a heavy heart my eyes continually turned to the tragic heap of rotting items intermingled with recyclable, yet non-biodegradable, packaging and merchandise.
When there’s another place to put it, it doesn’t seem to make sense to cut back. After all, another dump can just be built, right? Well, sort of. Eventually the overflows for the overflows will intrude upon our notice. But then it will be too late. The fact is that landfills will eventually affect the most isolated of us if we continue to consume as we do and disregard the fact that many of the most common things that we throw out can, in fact, be recycled. That really hit home for me when I moved to an area that offers optional curbside recycling.
My recycle bin (which is the same size as my city-issued trash can) often holds as much or more as the garbage can. That tells me that if everyone recycled, we could cut what goes to the landfill by half. And that is helpful on so many levels: land use, pollution, sanitation, and even economic.
The hard part is realizing that recycling does have far-reaching impacts, and these aren’t always just pollution-related. On a macroeconomic scale, the process has benefits. It requires much less energy to recycle materials than to produce virgin materials. One of our country’s greatest energy-saving solutions could be increased recycling. Additionally, recycling saves money in solid waste disposal. Right now the savings in these two areas combined totals more than $20 billion a year. Imagine what would happen if just a few more people started recycling each year!
Look in your trash. 40% of what is tossed is actually paper, one of the most easily recycled products we have (the other percentage that brings recyclables to half our trash is in metals, plastics, and other materials). Nearly every community has receptacles for paper recycling. Make it part of your weekly errands: once a week, before you do the grocery shopping, load up the paper you’ve saved for recycling and drop it off at the bin on your way to the store. You do not even need to have curbside recycling in your neighborhood to help put a dent in the unnecessary paper waste that accumulates each year.
Many communities now offer optional curbside recycling, but you do not know about it unless you call to ask, and therein lies the problem. People just do not know about recycling. Luckily, a phone call is relatively easy to make. In the town where I currently reside (Logan, UT), the $6 monthly fee is automatically added to my utility bill, so I do not have to worry about whether or not I paid for my recycling pick-up. This is a great model. A nominal fee goes to help save the earth, and the city can sell the recyclables to help support its program. Plus, money is saved in administration costs at the local dump.
Anyone can help fight the garbage takeover of our planet. The first step is simply being aware. Know what you are throwing out. Once I realized how much of my trash could be recycled, I began to feel an interest in seeking out ways to reduce my own trash output. The average person produces 4 pounds of trash per day, and if half of that can be recycled, that means that you can reduce your trash by 2 pounds a day. That’s 730 pounds per year! That’s a lot of trash that I can prevent from going to the dump, especially if I think about the impact my lifetime of recycling could have for the good of the planet: more than 45,000 pounds of garbage prevented from sullying our earth. And teaching my son the importance of recycling adds to my influence for the good of the planet. He’s only three, but I swell with pride every time he takes a tin can to the recycle receptacle in our home without having to be told that such an item does not belong in the trash.
