Recycle, Reuse, Reduce

Well, we do our very best to do those things. We've got two composters on the go out in the backyard, and empty all our kitchen waste into them on a regular basis. And then, of course, once a year, we have the pleasure of emptying one of the composters, leaving the other to continue being filled and to cook away into good compost. We're very good about hauling everything out to the composters in every season, but not very good about aerating it, turning it over.

The result? A stinky, wet mass when it comes to sprinkling it over the gardens. But, we do this in the very late fall, so by the time spring comes around, it's all been nicely broken down over winter and seeps and crumbles itself into the soil, enriching it and providing our gardens with the nurturance they require to reward us with healthy plants and huge, beautiful blooms. And of course, in the process we're bypassing the need to have all our kitchen waste hauled off to some municipal dump.

That's the recycle part of our dedication to our very near environment. There's also some reuse in there, as well. I do try to clean out and use all the plastic and glass food containers that I can, keeping a good supply of them around for all kinds of uses, temporary and otherwise. As for reduce, well, that's the hell of it, isn't it? We're natural-born consumers, sad to say. We have two newspapers delivered daily, and that's one heap of a pile of newsprint put out in our black boxes every two weeks.

And I have noticed that it has become very difficult to reduce the amount of recyclables we collect and put out in our blue box. Increasingly, produce is no longer loose, but placed inside boxes of one kind or another, plastic for the most part. Packaging is on the increase, not the other way around, in our increasingly-environmentally-sensitive world. And why is that? Why haven't all three levels of government who are burdened with the need to collect waste and recycle as much as they can, spoken to manufacturers?

I imagine many of those manufacturers are creating additional jobs, and presumably right at the home market. So no one in their right mind wishes to disturb that neat little problem. But it is a problem and it should be addressed. The fact is, even though we're placing plastics, metals, glass and paper in recycling bins, the truth appears to be that it makes us feel good, but it doesn't contribute anything useful to the problem of accumulated wastage.

Metal, which accounts for an infinitesimally small portion of the recyclable waste collected, appears to be the only material that can be sold at a decent price. Glass, plastics and newspaper recycling aren't really big on paying for themselves. They simply don't bring a price that would balance out the energy it takes to collect them; they're money-losers, municipalities pay far more than they get back to bring them into the recycling stream.

Fact is, even the collection of yard waste by municipalities for the very good purpose of creating mulch that can later be redistributed at a cost to home-owners, is a process that is energy-wasting, the process emitting far more CO2 than simply land-filling it. There are those who claim that the benefits of recycling are reversed by the resources utilized in collecting and processing.

We just cannot win for losing, it appears. Suddenly that glow of good citizenship and general societal achievement has lost its burnish.