I’ve never
considered myself to be a “tree hugging environmentalist” or outdoorsy kind of
guy. I prefer being indoors so camping, forget about it. In High School we used
to go camping all the time but for me it was just an excuse to stay out all
night and party. I usually ended up sleeping in the car, not very comfortable but
still better than sleeping on the ground, at least in my opinion. Back then in
the early 70’s I never really gave the environment much thought but as I look
back now I guess I’ve almost always made a little effort to be responsible. We
tried not to leave any trash when we did go camping and I can remember yelling
at one of my best friends because he was always throwing his empty fast food
bags out the car window. That wasn’t polluting just littering but it still
pissed me off. I would tell him “not out the window, that’s what the back seat
is for”.
In Flint, Michigan where I lived,
back in the 80’s and early 90’s there wasn’t any kind of public recycling other
than the 5 cent deposit on beverage bottles and cans. We had this “Hippy” dude
that had been able to get some grant money to start a recycling center that
took all the other stuff like newsprint, cardboard, aluminum, and glass. He was
only open a couple of days a week so you had to plan ahead to be responsible.
At the restaurants that Diane and I owned
in the early 90’s, we would save all our cardboard and rinsed out cans and jars
to take to the recycling center once a week. It was a pain in the butt because
we didn’t have much storage room but we felt we had to do something to try and help
save the planet.
Fast forward 20 years and I’m here
in California with a recycling tote that gets picked up every other week at
home and a free recycling dumpster at work. It takes almost no effort at all to
keep a big part of my garbage out of the landfill. It just doesn’t get much
easier.
So why am I writing about recycling
when it should be a no brainer? By now all of us should know about garbage and
the environment. It should be second nature, the very least that we can do. But
that’s the problem, to a lot of people it’s not.
This is the part I don’t get and
what drives me a little crazy. I work with a bunch of 20 something’s and a few
not so 20 something’s and I am constantly pulling plastic water and soda bottles
out of the trash. In the tasting room we recycle all our wine bottles back into
their boxes before taking them out to the recycle dumpster so it’s not like
they have to go out of their way to recycle the plastic. As a matter of fact,
they have to walk past the recycle box to get to the trash. Most of them seem
oblivious to what they are doing or should I say not doing.
It’s these young people I don’t
understand. My generation had to be taught and made to feel guilty into caring
by public service messages with images of smoke stacks, garbage piles and of a lone
Native American with a single tear drop rolling down his cheek. This younger
generation should have concern for the environment engrained in their blood, it
should be all that they have ever known or been taught. After all they are the
ones that will have to live with the garbage after me and my generation is gone.
And piles of garbage there is, tons of
it. In plastic bottles alone we as a nation throw away over 50 Million per day.
That’s Throw away with a capital T, not including recycled. Obviously I’m generalizing because not all young
people or all my co-workers are apathetic or lazy when it comes to recycling
and or the environment. But I sure do see a lot of it. So what can we do about
it? Not sure about you, but I’ll just keep picking their bottles out of the
trash and hope that sooner or later they get the message.
To view the column in it's original form go to page 16 of the following link. Winters Express 2/5/15
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