Written by Whitney Shurtleff
The Albertson’s parking lot recycling center has lost nearly 100 percent of its traffic with the arrival of the snazzy BluCan. That’s right. St. George has finally started to at least pretend to care about the environment with a new way to decrease our carbon footprints. An added bonus is the fact that you lazy people no longer have to worry about painstakingly placing each individual Mountain Dew bottle into a small hole, allowing you to make a difference while still maintaining your sanity. With the new BluCan plan, someone will come and pick your recyclables up from your home. They literally couldn’t have made this any easier for you.
I’m extremely passionate about the ocean. Most of you have probably never researched the Great Pacific Ocean garbage patch, but it’s real, and it’s a thing. This patch is sometimes described as a “trash island.” An island of trash. You may ask why someone doesn’t just go up and clean it up.
It’s not as easy as just going out and scooping the island up, because it’s hard to tell where it ends and where it begins. This nasty pile of junk is rumored to be the size of Texas, and the majority of it is comprised of plastic. And unfortunately for the marine life that tries to survive out there, plastic is not biodegradable. Personally, I recycle so that my grey Wal-Mart grocery bags don’t end up floating in a pit of grossness forever.
So what’s your excuse? I get that rinsing out your milk jug is probably the most effort you’ve put into something all week, but recycling is important, and you know it. You know those Mylar balloons you accidentally release into the air? Yeah, they never decompose. A venti cup from Starbucks takes 450 years along with your stupid Fiji water bottles. If you’re not convinced, I’m about to hit you with a string of recycling facts. Ready? Go.
The average person generates four pound of waste a day. (That’s not a poop joke.)
Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to play an entire album of music on your iPod — or two albums on your hip CD walkman.
Three quarters of the American waste stream is recyclable, but we only recycle about 30 percent of it.
So go ahead and make fun of me as I pull water bottles from random trash receptacles and argue with you about why boxed water really is better. Go ahead, put that beer can in your garbage and try to sleep at night knowing the plastic from the rings could someday strangle a sea turtle. Or you can just do the right thing and fill your BluCan up with the love that obviously doesn’t fill your heart. It’s up to you.
Ah Whitney, I love your passion and I love your writing, but there are so many excuses. Some of the excuses are even valid. And as long as we see ourselves as rats in a rat race well use those excuses. What needs to happen in my humble opinion is for people to actively choose to make the effort to stop using the excuses it is so easy for us to find. We need to realize we have a real influence and responsibility in and to the Earth and to each other. So, stings based on excoriating exhausted women (probably rinsers of milk cartons ARE women) are less effective than inspiring them with reasons to rinse. Maybe you, or someone who is passionate about recycling could form a class or group to teach those of us who have been deeply inculcated with a convenience over all other decision making mindset with reasons, ways and solid education about recycling and the environment that we are not all that connected to. What do you think?
What ever happened to a recycling fee (10cents/ can in some states) added to coke, water bottles or beer cans at the register? That always seem to be an incentives to crush them, throw them in a bag and take the stuff back to the manufacture via the state/ Recycling firms, plus, put the cash back in your own pocket. At lease you wouldn’t have thousands of Blue barrels down the streets. Next thing to come is Green ones for grass clipping only. Then the brown one for (you know what). I love clean beaches as much as the next person. But shaming folks to make a point? That’s what political folks do.