End Justifying Means?

What follows was written by my husband, first published on Flickr the other day. I use it with his agreement (of course), because it highlights something easily overlooked - especially in these days of water shortages. In our town recycling, on a grand scale, has come late but hey, better late than...

The recycling company engaged by town authorities demands that items for recycling and collection: paper, cardboard, plastics, cans, glass, should be reasonably clean. Husband's problem arose due to the nature of peanut butter, a food I seldom eat. My solution to his dilemma is: leave the glass peanut butter jars in the ordinary garbage bin without any pang of conscience - glass will not do the same harm to the environment as the demon plastic. Any other ideas?

First I scraped all the peanut butter I could from inside the jar, applying it sparingly to my toast. I licked the spatula too.

Next I soaked the jar and spatula in water and a squirt of detergent. I ran the water until it was hot. Cold water would not have made any advances toward loosening the peanut oil remaining in the jar and on the spatula.

I ate my toast.

I went back to the jar in the sink and ran more hot water into the jar, and scrubbed it with a sponge.

I wiped the spatula clean and dried it with a tea towel. The oil came off the spatula fairly easily.

But not so the jar, which required a third wash with fresh detergent and hot water.

Finally the jar was nearly clear of any remaining peanut butter or oil. I wiped out the inside with the tea towel just in case.

Now for the lid, it was the same process basically but some of the peanut butter had begun to dry out on the inner side of the lid. It took an extra washing and finally a wipe with the tea towel. I tossed the tea towel into the washing machine because it was rather smudged now and probably wouldn’t do for drying any dishes or hands.

Finally, I had the jar ready for the recycling bin. Just doing my bit for conservation.

That reminds me I need to add dish detergent and peanut butter to the grocery list.

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.")

Retro recycling

Pluto, Neptune, and Jupiter are now appearing to move backward, or as astrologers say, "retrograde", Uranus will join them later this month. Recycling has been on my mind lately. Perhaps that planetary motion has something to do with it.

Recycling used to be a way of life back 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. There are few facilities to encourage recycling, and these are getting fewer by the week. Every 3 months or so we've been ferrying our collection of newspapers and cans the 35 miles to a recycling collection centre in a neighbouring city. I read this week that the big military base in that city, whose staff used to collect recycling materials from several centres, has been prevented, by Department of Defense financial constraints, from continuing these collections (except for those from a single bin in one area of the city).

Why am I surprised? The current U.S. administration seems interested only in destruction. Corporations are interested only in retail gluttony. Private enterprise, which could surely make a profit from recycling, finds it easier to do so in other ways. Our own city authorities appear to have no interest at all in recycling, in spite of requests.

There are other ways to re-cycle though. Charity shops, junk shops, "antique" shops, e-bay, garage and yard sales, all offer opportunities to by-pass the retail juggernaut. We visit Goodwill shops regularly, most of my shirts come from there. With a little patient searching it's possible to find some better quality items than are on sale in the shops in this town.

I have a growing collection of what I call "trash art" - that's yet another way of re-cycling. Pieces of driftwood, an old bicycle chain, a vintage car horn, the cover of some old sheet music, and my Aquarius symbol made from scrap copper by AJ.( son of HWK) . It's fun searching for these, and good knowing that the few dollars they cost are not going into the pockets of greed obsessed corporations.