Earth: "This Godawful mess"

To give this post an astrological flavour I'll invite passing visitors, before reading on, to crank up their inner Virgo (responsible, careful, health conscious), and their inner Saturn (self-discipline, thrift).......then continue:

And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: "Look at this Godawful mess." ~ Art Buchwald, humorist

By the time I left its fair shores in 2004, recycling had become way of life in England. Local authorities provided separate garbage bins for our newspapers. Centres for collection of other items, such as glass and aluminium cans, were plentiful in most neighbourhoods. Here in Oklahoma it's a different story. Few facilities to encourage recycling exist, and whenever some do emerge they are short-lived.

For a few years we ferried our collection of newspapers and aluminium cans the 35 miles to a recycling collection centre in a neighbouring city. Then the military base in that city, whose staff collected recycling materials from several centres, was prevented, by Department of Defense financial constraints, from continuing the collections. Later a few, smaller, re-cycling bins were replaced in school locations.

Then, about a year ago, Power Shop, an organisation which helps to provide jobs for people with disabilities set up a re-cycling centre in our town. We were able to deposit paper, cans, cardboard, and plastic bottles there regularly. The centre seemed to be doing good business, but last week, when we visited to deposit some newspapers, we were told that the centre is closing, is now closed in fact, for re-cycling, but will continue to accept donations of aluminium cans. Reason: it hasn't made a profit. “We had a grand idea that we believed would provide jobs for people with disabilities, help the community, save the earth and make money,” the executive director said in a statement. “Unfortunately, it did everything except make money.”

Ye gods!!! Surely the state or city or federal government could subsidise something as important as this, so that profit need not be paramount? I should send a letter or a copy of this post, perhaps, to the state's governor, Mary Fallin - but it's a lost cause. A standard letter would be the response, as it was when I wrote to our Senator Tom Coburn about health care reform. They. Don't. Care. In this as in many spheres Oklahoma lags behind the rest of the US. I should not tar the whole of the US with the same brush. The following is from Encyclopedia of Earth's Recycling section

.....In particular, the culture of consumption of post-World War II America re-enforced carelessness, waste, and a drive for newness. Environmental concerns contributed to a new "ethic" within American culture that began to value restraint, re-use, and living within limits. This ethic of restraint, fed by over-used landfills and excessive litter, gave communities a new mandate in maintaining the waste of their population. Re-using products or creating useful byproducts from waste offered application of this new ethic while also offering new opportunity for economic profit and development.

Non-profit recycling centers began opening around the country, followed by municipal recycling programs. Today, most U.S. communities have such programs. A typical program asks people to separate their recyclables from their trash before placing them at the curb for collection. To encourage recycling, some communities also charge residents for the quantity of trash put out for collection. The most commonly recycled household items are paper and cardboard; metal, glass, and plastic containers and packaging; and yard waste. Recycling the recovered materials is simple for metals and glass; they can be melted down, reformed, and reused. Yard waste can be composted with little or no equipment. Paper, the most important recycled material, must be mixed with water, and sometimes de-inked, to form a pulp that can be used in papermaking. Plastics recycling requires an expensive process of separation of different resins.

In the US, plastics are all numerically coded according to type, including: polyethylene terphthalate (PETE or PET; 1) an example of these plastics are virtually all soft drink bottles, high density polyethylene (HDPE; 2) an example would be detergent bottles, polyvinyl chloride (PVC; 3), sometimes used for water or oil bottles but now rare in food beverage packaging, due to concerns about its environmental hazards; low density polyethylene (LDPE; 4) often used for plastic bags, polypropylene (PP; 5) examples are some yogurt containers and bottle caps, and polystyrene (PS; 6) used to make Styrofoam containers. Number 7 seen on some packaging, refers to all plastics other than these six. It is not a single plastic material.

Lessons are being learned - somewhere - if not in Oklahoma. Because of the horrendous growth of the "plastic garbage island" in the North Pacific, grown 100-fold in the past 40 years, several Californian city authorities have placed a ban on the use of plastic bags in grocery stores. That's a start! The use of styrofoam/plastic cups, cutlery and plates in motels and fast-food places ought to be next on the list.


Photograph from ambiental.

The huge patch (some say the size of Texas, but calculation is difficult because much of the broken down material remains below the surface) of 80% plastic garbage has been created by waste swept into the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone by circulating ocean currents known as a gyre. Eventually the plastics are broken down by wind and waves and become small particles which will, someday, enter the food chain.

"Your descendants shall gather your fruits." ~ Virgil
(Note: I'd add to Virgil's ancient wisdom, and no doubt it was implied anyway: "whether the fruits be nourishing or poisoned is up to you.")