I heard an interesting interview on television with Bill Nye the other day. He held up a plastic drinking straw and one made of paper. “The person using the plastic straw isn’t a bad person,” he said with a big grin. What we do have, he said, is a big challenge for scientists. And the fascinating challenge it to quickly develop biodegradable plastics, he said.
Good points. We use metal reusable drinking straws at our house, though we ask for straws when we eat out and are slightly annoyed if the restaurant doesn’t have any. But this is so TINY in the big picture of pollution and the earth.
The New Three R’s–Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
What Mr. Nye preaches is the three R’s – reduce, reuse, and recycle.
And I suspect most everyone is doing what they can. But is there more?
I must admit I don’t always use cloth grocery bags. I do when I think about it. But I have found they don’t wash well and frankly seem unclean after a bit. So as I get new ones, I try to keep them in my trunk until they don’t seem so usable. However, my local grocery store, H-E-B, which serves Texas, has bins in the front of all stores to recollect the plastic bags when I use those. Those bins also collect other plastic bags, like those from the newspaper, other stores or other plastics, like soft drink rings. In 2017, the grocery chain recycled 2 million pounds of plastic bags.
H-E-B Grocery in Texas
In 2017, H-E-B in all diverted more than 461 million pounds of waste from landfills by recycling cardboard, plastics, organics, office paper, metals and truck tires. Those efforts saved the equivalent of 12 million trees, one million barrels of oil and 690 million kilowatt hours—enough to power more than 45,000 homes for a whole year, according to H-E-B officials.
The store’s organic diversion effort sent more than 50 million pounds of waste to composting and animal feed instead of to the landfill. And by increasing the number of items that go into plastic bags at checkout, the chain saved some 308 million bags in 2017. The chain’s Organic Diversion Programs have diverted more than 50 million pounds of organics from the landfill to compost and animal feed.
City Pickup Recycling
Our city offers a trash recycling program, where recyclables are picked up every other week from special garbage carts provided by the city. Texas Disposal Systems picks up those recyclables and processes the majority through its Materials Recovery Facility here in Central Texas. The facility processes more than 50,000 pounds of recyclable material per hour, including glass, cardboard, paper, aluminum and plastics.
And the City of San Marcos monitors what goes into our recycle carts on a spot basis. They leave us a note if, for example, our recyclables include a dirty paper towel or used pizza box. The recyclables need to be clean and rinsed material, not dirty. It’s taken me a while to get used to what is accepted. But it’s an effort worth making. By the way, Texas Disposal says most recycling is done on site and that which isn’t is handled elsewhere in the U.S. NONE, they said, winds up in the ocean or abroad.
Thinking About What We Use–Plastics
Of course, what we really need to do is think carefully about everything we use and select only the most recyclable. According to Earth911.com, plastics are a real culprit, as we all probably know. They start off with oil and natural gas, converted into smaller pieces then chemically bonded to create long chains or polymers. These make up water bottles, food packaging and much more.
Drilling reaches the oil and natural gas buried beneath layers of bedrock in the Earth’s crust. And this drilling and fracking is wrecking the environment and endangering our health, Earth911.com says.
Glass and the Environment
But glass has an environmental impact too. Liquefied sand, soda ash (naturally occurring sodium carbonate), limestone, recycled glass and various additives make up the containers from which we drink or keep our jelly. This is rather innocuous except for the limestone mining that may contaminate water or destroy habitat for animals that live in limestone caves.
Aluminum Cans
Then we move to aluminum cans that are almost always made from bauxite, a mineral that the U.S. gets from mines in countries like Guinea and Australia. This mining is hard on the environment, which is obtained from a pit, leaving environmental destruction.
The Aftermath of Use
OK, so now they are empty and then what? Only 9.5 percent of plastic generated in the U.S. was recycled in 2014, according to Earth911.com. The rest was burned for energy or sent to a landfill, where it may spend 500 years before decomposing.
The good news about glass is that it’s 100 percent recyclable and about 80 percent is made into new glass bottles, often with the bottles back on the shelves within a month. Aluminum cans are also completely recyclable and can be recycled repeatedly without limit. But we’re only recycling about 45 percent of cans, which means mining for bauxite continues. In her book, The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard notes that humans have trashed more than a trillion aluminum cans in landfills since 1972, when such records began.
Best Choices
So, according to Earth911.com, your choice should be aluminum cans made from 100 percent recycled material (I can’t see any indication on the Dr. Pepper cans in my house), followed by glass and in last place plastic. Our household uses a combination of all of these.
The Overflowing Bathtub
It’s all a bit overwhelming to me. But I have to keep doing what I can. I found this quote that I thought was especially telling:
“When your bathtub is overflowing, you don’t run for a mop before you turn off the faucet. Recycling is the mop. We need to turn off the faucet.”—Jacqueline Savitz, Chief Policy Officer at Oceana