Recycling realities
I remember as a young child my Mama would put me in the tub for a bath and hair wash. She would use Prell Shampoo, a green viscous liquid with a pearl in it that floated languidly about as you tilted the glass bottle, showing the luxurious texture. But sometimes the bottle would escape slippery wet fingers, fall into the porcelain tub and shatter. Mama would yank me out of the tub, drain the water and clean up the glass shards. We might or might not start over with the bath after that. Later in my childhood, plastic shampoo bottles emerged. Hallelujah!
I sometimes buy milk in plastic jugs. It’s significantly cheaper to buy the plastic gallon than two half-gallon waxed cartons. And I can recycle the bottle! But I do worry about what leaches out of the plastic into my milk. I pay extra to buy organic milk to avoid chemicals that appear in “conventional” milk—shouldn’t I avoid the plastic, too? But the waxed cardboard cartons can’t be recycled. I have to pay to dump them (I live in the country. No garbage pickup). Oh, these choices give me a headache.
Once upon a time, in a community far away, steadfast carers of the planet devoutly hauled plastic bottles, glass jars, and aluminum cans to the collection center for recycling. All was well until these kind stewards of the earth learned that their energies were for naught—the recycling was just pretend. All the carefully sorted discards were tossed into one big landfill.
Needless to say, folks were furious. So, they started their own recycling yard and learned the overseers had to be militant about what was collected. If the collection bin gets too “contaminated” by stuff that can’t really be recycled, it is no longer cost effective to recycle at all.
I understand this. But the rules seem to change. And the manufacturers of plastics are sneaky. They put those little triangles with a number in the middle on everything, which makes it appear it’s all recyclable. But alas, that’s not true.Some things are not accepted for recycling.
The triangle is there to make us feel good – or bad, depending. If you know your recycling center won’t work with these plastics, the recycling emblem leaves you feeling it is your responsibility to figure out what to do with them.
In Berryville, where I take my recycling, there is a big sign over one bin that says “Plastic bottles.” It doesn’t say plastic salad boxes, plastic yogurt cups, or old broken Cuisinart tops. (Yes, I’ve seen one of those in the bin.) So, citizens are left to determine if the sign means what it says or if it really just means plastic in general. If enough of us guess wrong, we could contaminate the whole bin and nothing gets reused. Of course we’ll never know, so maybe people are okay to be in the dark.
Apparently curbside recycling takes out some of the guesswork—if you put something in the recycle box that doesn’t qualify, it gets left behind. Then you know it can’t be recycled. Unless, of course, the entire content gets left behind because it’s too mixed up.
Recycling the reality of broken glass in the bathtub is not my desire. Although I do have a romantic feeling about milk delivered to the front door in glass bottles. (I’m old, eh?) I just wish corporate America could find an equilibrium between what’s good and what’s profitable without dumping an impossible responsibility—and the corresponding guilt— on the public.