I’m very sympathetic to environmentalism and recycling and all that jazz, but here I am standing in the cafe at Whole Foods with my pile of trash and staring at four different bins — landfill, compost, and something else, and something basura — and trying to figure out what goes where, and you know what I just can’t be bothered any more.
I can’t be bothered to keep my glass bottles separated. I can’t be bothered to specially dispose of my light bulbs or batteries. They’re just going in the bin with everything else. Let god sort it out.
Curbside pickup doesn’t make me any more wiling. There’s just too much else going on in my life and my head and there’s the laundry and the lawn and the commute and bills and taxes and exercise and nutrition and uncertainty at work and stressful relationships, you know what, someone else is going to have to take this one on.
Yeah, I know it’s good for me, and it’s good for the environment, and it’s good for the human race, and it’s good for the future. But, you know what, this sorting thing, as simple as it is, it’s too much for me. As little effort as it takes, it’s more effort than I can spare at this time in my life. I have to square to spare.
And you know what, fuck the future of the human race. We’ll mess our ecosystem into extinction, and life will go on without us, maybe even better without us. And, eventually, some other species will get the fine opportunity to mess up the universe.
Having spent quite a bit of time living in Oregon, I quite agree with the original post.
There are days I just want to smash a rotten non-organic banana into the smug faces of every corporation owner out there going ‘green’ only because there is MONEY in it. Ugh.
I recycle for the kids. That is, I save out my insanely-high-number of soda cans for the boys to recycle because it’s free money to them. Otherwise…pfft. And yes, I am rather a nice person, who refrains, reuses and repairs FAR more often than most people recycle. So neener.
I get called out at other peoples’ places for putting trash in the trash. Or not rinsing out a pop can and leaving it next to the sink with rows of others. Recycling does not jibe with my germophobia. What am I rinsing so many cans, a hobo?
I hit this same wall when defrosting our freezer and cleaning out the fridge. Instead of throwing it all in the bin like we used to, I had to defrost everything, and then divide all the soggy containers and food into the correct bin.
That and having to peel the foil off the Gorgonzola rind so the rind can go in the organic bin and the foil can be rinsed and put in with the metal…
I work at Whole Foods and while it does take extra thought and time to sort everything properly, I quite enjoy doing it and feel like I’m making a difference. To each their own I guess.
Just please, throw everything in Landfill when you get frustrated; it ruins some people’s day when Compost is full of plastic forks and they have to dig through gigantic bags of half-eaten food.
I think this is the biggest benefit of recycling, the fact that you FEEL like you are making a difference. Whether you are or are not is definitely up for debate.
You have a good point, and I do agree with it. We can only be expected to be what is reasonable, which for many sorting trash into so many components and in other cases remembering what is taken curb side which week is really not for everyone. Yes some people can do it without batting a eyelash, and that’s great. But when it becomes burdensome, hey we are throwing out trash, lets just get on with life.
Very simply the technology has to improve, and for some already here, where there is single stream recycling, beyond that single stream disposal of everything.
Just do what you can when you can, we are already landfill mining anyway, so it’s just a matter of time before your lunch remnants are dug up and sorted properly.
The OP started with not being willing to dispose of batteries properly and ended with “fuck the future of the human race,” which seemed pretty much like a nervous breakdown to me.
I’ve never been to the Cafe at Whole Foods but can’t you just leave it all at a table for the wait staff to process? They should be knowledgeable and willing… I hope.
I am the opposite. I sort my trash and recycle obsessively. We have curbside recycling here, one big bin for everything. I can go weeks without taking my garbage to the curb but my recycling bin is full every other week when they pick up. I save up dead batteries in a bucket and save florescent bulbs to take to the hardware store for recycling. I also save my plastic shopping bags to take to the grocery for recycling.
I pick the aluminum and plastic bottles out of the trash at work and toss them in the recycle bin a few steps away.
Hmm…when I’m in public I occasionally expend a lot of time and effort looking for public toilets. Maybe I should just let the chips fall where they may…
I grew up in the 1970’s when Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” was very popular (again) and people were listening beyond the first few verses. That made environmentalism (or at least anti-littering) a new and popular “Save the Planet” and “Keep America’s Back Yard Clean” fad. [Earth day will be something like 40 years old next year – go figure!] But there’s a wide gulf between Distributionists and the Environmental Liberation Front.
As far as the end-users go, I haven’t really seen much incentive for recycling. I did date a young lady for a while who said in her home town near San Francisco, the city trash service charged residents by-the-pound (or so her mother told her) and that encouraged maximum recycling and keeping the trash cans clean because whatever wasn’t weighed (aluminum, mowed grass, glass, goopy splashes, etc.) during the pick-up wasn’t charged to the resident. That seems reasonable. It might not pay well to recycle, particularly if you don’t have much to recycle each week, but wasteful people would end up paying for their extra wastefulness.
Out here in So. Cal. there are people who go through dumpsters and pull out every possible recyclable or refurbishable item. The ones who come by my complex are not homeless people, either. They have a truck for big items and a couple hand-carts for smaller stuff and they come by in different clothes each day. They’ve got to be living somewhere to store all that stuff. My wife finds it annoying; I see it as just another facet of city living – they’re surviving (I don’t know enough to say they’re living well) off the carelessness of the residents of the complex (and probably a few other complexes, as well). I make a point to shred all my personal data, though.
—G!
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.
. --Woodie Guthrie
. This Land is Your Land
