If it feels good, do it
Writing by treason on Sunday, 25 of February , 2007 at 9:19 am
A few years ago I made friends with an outspoken red-haired Liberal who grew up in Texas and, because of her line of work, spent a good deal of time in Washington around politicians. She had a collection of stories about “the Bush boys,” Algore, and local politicos, and she seemed to have an anecdote for everything.
The consensus at work was that she was completely full of sh*t. But it didn’t really matter to me that hers was a vivid and wild imagination; whether genuine or fabricated, her stories were always entertaining. And fun to listen to over a couple vodka martinis.
One day we met up for a taste test - Guinness or Murphy’s? - and she was talking about a meeting she’d had with Algore. Somehow we got on the topic of recycling.
“Hey, if it makes you feel better, go on ahead, but you’re really wasting your time.”
“Fine Liberal you are. So you’re saying you don’t recycle?”
“Hell, no. Not here. Everything you spend your precious time separating for recycling just ends up in landfill. It’s in the dump with all the regular trash. You didn’t know that?”
The room started spinning and I damned near fell off my barstool. My life was flashing before my eyes - yes, my life as a series of TV commercials - starting from the time when Smokey’s middle name was “The.” I saw Chief Iron Eyes Cody on horseback. The words “Don’t be a litter bug!” were pounding inside my head like the sound of the garbage can lid against Carlo Rizzi’s face.
“You okay?”
It felt like the time when I had my dog cremated and then a local reporter broke the story that our pet crematory was playing fast and loose with the remains of our deceased pets. Who the hell is really in that urn? Muffy the cat? Peanuts the poodle? Polly the parrot? Vinnie the ferret? Is it, or is it not, my beloved brindle Boxer Barbara?
Being deceived is one thing, but suspecting it and having it confirmed is agony. “Toss no mas,” my ass. See, Toss No Mas is our state’s anti-litter campaign. Someone somewhere decided that the highest litter offenders are males who range in age from 16 to 24. Probably the same ones who toss their empty beer bottles from their cars as they’re speeding through the streets of Albuquerque. One commercial shows a young Hispanic couple in their car: the male casually tosses his trash and his girlfriend points out that he’s littering. He stabs her repeatedly and leaves her in the desert to die. Just kidding.
Another ad presents a Hispanic family spending quality time together, tossing debris from the back of their pick-up truck on to the mesa, along with a new litter of pitbull puppies. Just kidding. (Actually, people do toss their unwanted pitbull puppies out in the middle of the mesa, but I’m not about to get into that at this juncture because it’s too early in the day for me to have a stroke.)
Before you call me a racist or xenophobe, I’m not the one producing the ads aimed at a particular demographic. No doubt you’ve seen border footage - piles of trash in the desert left by illegals sneaking into the country. Except it doesn’t stop at our southern border. Nuevo Mexico is a pigsty.
When we moved here, much of the area was still open mesa, filled with native plants, jackrabbits, roadrunners, and coyotes. My first reaction was to hope that these areas would remain undeveloped. But time passed and I quickly changed my mind. What’s the point of open space if people are just going to fill it up with broken beer bottles, used condoms, dead appliances, and piles of garbage?
I had to ask myself: Is this a cultural thing? Is it only uptight white people who teach their children to put their trash in the proper receptacles? Is it only uptight white people who stand at the kitchen sink, paralyzed, wondering if they should recycle the cat food cans?
“I should do this. I know I should do this. But I need to rinse the cans first. Do I use precious water to rinse these cans and perhaps ‘waste’ another valuable resource? Oh, what to do! What to do!”
We don’t have a bottle law in this state, and even though I hate these layers of regulation, I have to wonder if putting a value on a beer bottle might help to reduce the number of broken ones that prevent me from enjoying a simple walk with the dog.
Unlike California, residents have not been provided with recycling bins to put out on the curb. In fact, when we moved here, the city hadn’t even supplied citizens with trash receptacles for weekly garbage pick-up. No, we dumped our trash bags outside and waited for stray dogs to tear open the Hefty bags, or for a murder of crows to swoop down and pick through our debris and spread it all over the neighborhood before it was picked up for disposal.
When the city finally got around to addressing recycling, the rules were so complicated that most people determined that it was easier to just throw everything in the trash and learn to live with the guilt. I still don’t put my recyclables out on the curb. It’s just easier for me to periodically round everything up and drive it to the nearby recycling dumpsters.
I’ve been doing this for ages, but I always remember my friend and her story about how it’s all dumped in landfill and how we’ve been sold a bill of goods. And then a news story broke recently about how 150 tons of recyclables were dumped with the rest of the trash. Sounds like a supervisor “took it upon himself” to make that decision and now the city promises to recover the lost recyclables. The problem, of course, is they had workers sort through it (no, seriously, they did) and they were able to pull out maybe two tons. But the city wants to assure us that they’re on top of the situation. They will “make up the difference” by sorting business trash - trash that usually goes straight to landfill - and pulling 148 tons of recyclables out of that. Just so we who recycled that original 150 tons don’t feel like we wasted our time. Oh - and the city is thinking about installing a Web cam so citizens can watch the trash being delivered to the dump and see that their paper, glass, and aluminum are actually being kept separate from the “real” garbage and occasional dead bodies. This is called “restoring the public trust.”
The particulars of our current program are too convoluted to explain here but suffice it to say that Nuevo Mexico is not on the cutting edge. We don’t have a system that actually recycles material; instead, we sell off what we can to businesses that are capable of recycling, and we stockpile the rest. Can we interest you in a mountain of broken glass?
So really what we have here is a recycling program that doesn’t actually work. But there are plans to fix the problem and once our politicians figure out how they can convince the taxpayers of Nuevo Mexico to finance these plans, we’ll be catching up to some of the other states. Garbage, after all, is a terrible thing to waste.
But I guess it’s like Barbara, in her “Urn of the Unknown Canine.” Maybe it’s not her and maybe it’s someone’s silver tabby, but I know — whomever it is — that someone somewhere took the time and effort to dispatch their pet with considerable expense and dignity instead of just tossing a cold body in landfill.
So maybe it’s a question of respect, then. Of finding value in something that others might deem garbage. And maybe that’s why I continue to fill up my car each week and drive to the recycling center. Either that, or I’m just an uptight, gullible whitey.
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