Here’s something to put a smile on your face. Decades ago, Americans were goaded into what became known as “recycling.”
I used the word “goaded” because we were shamed, badgered, even threatened with arrest, to separate our garbage into neat piles ahead of curb pickup.
Before that time, people would place their trash into a receptacle that eventually wound up on the curb to await a garbage truck for collection. Once collected, that spaghetti sauce covered plastic bottle, dirty jug, and greasy newspapers would make their way to the dump where it all was summarily buried.
Involved in this operation were the following: homeowner, garbage can manufacturer, garbage truck driver, garbage truck loader, landfill bulldozer operator, and some city or county supervisor. All this worked well for decades, generously employing all these honorable people who performed valuable services while paying taxes.
That tax money became a self-perpetuating operation resulting in a virtual zero-sum activity.
But suddenly, The Smart People rose to the surface of that well-oiled guvment activity to insist everything up to this point was wrong. End of debate.
These Smart People dissected everything mentioned above and did so cogently. From the garbage truck to the dump to the individual employees, each item was addressed seriatim before one city and county meeting after another.
Soon, television stations, radio media, and newspapers, alike, were proudly spreading the word that our new national religion was “recycling.”
Recycling is a system that involves the homeowner sorting their garbage before it makes its way to the curb. Sounds pretty simple, right?
Wrong.
Is seems garbage all has its own pedigree: cans, bottles, newspapers and cardboard, and miscellaneous trash are separate and distinct from one another. Now, the simple becomes the complex. Why?
The Smart People.
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| A very noble worker |
The way it was explained was as follows: Landfills across the planet were filling up at an alarming rate. To prevent the soon-to-overflow dumps from, uh, overflowing, our trash was mandated to be sorted before disposal.
Let’s take a minor detour here. Decades ago I remember my Mother placing empty milk bottles into our milk box that sat on our front porch. Along with a note, those empties were normally exchanged for full bottles of milk or cream, butter, plus eggs, and other dairy products delivered to our door.
No milk or cream bottles were disposed of, rather they were reused or, in other terms: recycled.
One milk truck made its way throughout the town, instead of every car in town driving to the store. Sounds pretty efficient to me; less pollution, you see.
But The Smart People thought otherwise. Now back to the story.
Once the old wave garbage collection song was transformed into a symphony, everything connected therein became convoluted by adding new recycling bins: one for plastic and metal cans, one for paper, one for glass, and yet another for raw garbage.
All these added costs and steps needed another element added to this equation: one special truck for each of the sorted garbage bins. That hidden snag abruptly introduced many more trash trucks to the streets thereby polluting and causing more congestion for other traffic. Oh, my.
After a number of years, the populace was still apathetic about separating garbage and letting those expensive guvment-issued recycling bins sit idle, much to the chagrin of the guvment itself.
It was no longer an option to recycle in a growing number of those once-agog municipalities that eventually switched from optional to mandatory. Those simple color-coded plastic bins were re-issued with barcodes that became germane to discovering who was, and who was not, recycling.
Of course, thoughtful fines were added to tax bills to demonstrate the genuineness of this earnest effort to save Mother Earth.
And so it continued all the while the guvment and its official propagandist, NPR, repeated the mantra of “Reduce, reuse, and recycle,” as well as a catchy one from has-been actor Ed Begley, Jr., “If you’re not buying recycled products, you’re not really cycling.” How’s that for hard-hitting?
These references were to the re-manufacture of plastic bags and bottles into carpets and clothes, while glass bottles were transformed into sand. Wow! Who knew sand was in such short supply?
Still, this recycling effort quickly transformed into a grift which was clearly evident when, after thirty, or so years, the big announcement was made – nation-wide – that recycling glass was no longer an option; it seems a though recycling glass is much too expensive. Oops!
I’ll wait while you go back and re-read that last paragraph.
What once resulted in a lien possibly placed on your home for not recycling was magically transformed into a “good enuf,” shrug.
With that in mind, just what is America doing with all the rest of their garbage – sorted and otherwise?
Since you asked, plastic bottles are washed, melted, and reused for not only carpets and clothing, but also containers for such things as new shampoo bottles. The rub is that recycled materials are “three times as expensive as virgin” virgin being brand new plastic made straight from oil and gas out of the ground,” said Ernie Simpson from TerraCycle in Trenton, NJ.
He continued, “It costs a lot. There’s not a lot of money to be made from recycling to begin with, and it’s tough for recycled plastic to compete with virgin plastic made cheap by the boom in U.S. oil and gas production. And there aren’t nearly enough recyclers in the U.S. to handle the tsunami of new plastic pouring out of the petrochemical industry.”
This begs the question: What is the recycling industry to do with so much unused, unrecycled garbage in America?
It seems as though locally, the definitive answer is that the recyclables are being rightly placed in the dumps where they once were to avoid the continued “aesthetic and hygienic nuisance” of misused facilities, per the Wicomico County Executive Office, in Maryland.
I’m pretty sure no family members were involved in a scheme to extract guvment contract monies for their own benefit.
But there you have it. Problem unsolved, but good enuf.
