Monday, Jan. 28, 2008

Recycling's in the Bag

Lyn Pry

I’m going to be real up-front and straight about this ... I don’t understand not being environmentally correct.

I don’t see an advantage to accumulating waste, instead of recycling it into something else which can be used productively.

Take old car tires, for instance. Instead of filling up dumps (that’s the politically incorrect name for land fills) to collect stagnant water, which breeds mosquitoes—West Nile virus, anyone?—why not convert them into road surfaces, or environmentally-correct sandals?

Okay, okay—hauling old tires somewhere may be too bothersome for people. But how much harder is it to put a used soda can in a recycle bin instead of the regular trash? Really, I don’t get it.

Maybe my lack of understanding stems from being from Wisconsin. How so? Well, the idea for an Earth Day each April 22 was the brain child of Wisconsin Gov. Gaylord Nelson. I’ve been wearing green and white clothing – a visual representation of Earth Day – every April 22 since 1970.

Apparently, I’m not the only person who finds being environmentally correct a good idea.

The recycle materials used in the Marcus High School set is a good example of finding another use for materials which would otherwise be discarded (see this week’s story on going “green.”)

Here’s another related piece of information. Just this Tuesday, the grocery store chain Whole Foods announced it would no longer be using plastic bags.

According to its web site: “it will stop offering disposable, plastic grocery bags in all 270 stores in the United States, Canada and Britain by Earth Day -- April 22. That means roughly 100 million plastic bags will be kept out of the environment by the end of 2008.”

Whole Foods also includes in its web site: “Americans throw away about 100 billion plastic bags annually, said Worldwatch, an environmental research group. It takes more than 1,000 years for a nonrecyclable plastic bag to break down in a landfill, it says.”

The web site also pointed out that not everyone was supportive of Whole Food’s discontinuing its use of plastic bags. “During a test in Austin, one angry customer wrote Whole Foods that he’ll miss the plastic bags he uses for tossing out garbage.”

Duh!

For information on the history of Earth Day, visit: http://earthday.envirolink.org/history.html