Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 12, 1993 TAG: 9301120293
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
CALL IT RUBBLE WITHOUT A CAUSE
There comes with being an American a certain guilt about the gross wastefulness of it all. No civilization, no nation ever in the history of our species or our planet has manufactured so much rubbish.Who among us can look at a photograph of a famished kid in Somalia; or an old man lugging firewood through the snow in Sarajevo; or Russian women waiting in line outside a depleted butcher shop, without feeling a pang of conscience?
You, an American, can stand numbly before a wall display of disposable diapers the size of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and contemplate the choice of blue 12-pound, tape-on, ultra-absorbent undies or the pink 24-pound, pull-up, regular-absorbency type.
You drive alone, your car fumes chewing into the ozone layer. You throw out more than 1,000 pounds of garbage yearly. Your faucets drip while crops on other continents wither for lack of rain.
One balm for the frazzling American spirit has been recycling.
Whether or not we made a dent in the garbage stream, we could convince ourselves we were contributing to thinner landfills simply by sorting cans, paper, bottles and plastics.
We moaned, but really it wasn't that big of a deal. Only the most slovenly - or conscience-less - can resist.
I have come to love recycling, as a salve. I still dump my used motor oil in the weeds out back - I am, after all, American - but I do enjoy the weekly sorting of recyclables. Makes me feel as if I'm doing my Earth bit, and with virtually no exertion on my part at all.
Such a zealot have I become that I save the plastics the city won't collect at my curbside and I tote them to the Cycle Systems 24-hour recycle-o-rama off Wonju Street.
These rejects include the opaque, colored jugs for laundry detergents, motor oils, bleaches and dish soaps. We inveterate recyclers call it HDPE for high-density polyethylene.
Long have I heard rumors that HDPE was the poor stepchild of the recycling world; now I learn it's been orphaned.
Soon, any day now, perhaps as we speak, Cycle Systems will stop accepting HDPE plastics. There's no money in them. The word in the upper echelons of the plastic industry is that new HDPE is so cheap, who needs secondhand goods?
Until the price of crude oil triples, or the cost of dumping in a landfill quintuples, it'll be cheaper to make new plastic jugs.
Roanoke city never wanted the HDPE jugs and does not collect them from the 16,000 households in the city's recycling program.
The county does take them and promptly hands them over to Cycle Systems. Recycling fans in Roanoke County can soon expect word, as they can throughout the valley and beyond, that their HDPE is no longer welcome.
Bring us your milk jugs and your soda-pop bottles, but leave the laundry detergent at home.
Worse yet, drop it in the trash.
That will hurt. For many of us, it'll be the first time we've thrown plastic in the garbage for a long time.
We'll be enviro-swine. We'll be American.