Waste Not, Want Not

When were moving into our apartment in Boulder (the hippie capitol of Colorado), the leasing agent was talking over the utilities with us, discussing how much they generally cost per month. “And of course, there’s a flat charge of $X per month for trash and recycling,” she finished. “Oh,” I said, “recycling is included?” She gave me a look that asked what part of the world we had been living in that wouldn’t include recycling.


In places that are not Boulder, Colorado, recycling is a pain. When I was a kid, we recycled aluminum cans. It was my brothers’ job to squish them and put them in big trash cans in the back yard. Then they would sit for months or years before something else was done with them. Probably they were taken to the man who pays for them, in his semi trailer in the alley behind Kinko’s on 48th and Vine. (The cans, that is, not my brothers.)


I quickly got used to having a dumpster for recycling in Boulder. It was the same size as the dumpster for garbage, and filled up three times as quickly. The best part was that you didn’t have to sort anything. Glass, paper, plastic, aluminum, anything with a recycling symbol on it could be tossed into the recycling dumpster to be taken to a sorting center, and we could go on living our lives and feeling better about ourselves knowing that we were saving the earth.


I’m not a militant recycler. (I’m not a militant anything. Everything in moderation.) Just because I was enjoying finding out all the things I could toss into the recycling dumpster instead of the garbage didn’t mean I wanted to go join the crazies on the 16th Street Mall in Denver who walk up to random passers by, harassing them with things like “Don’t you love the earth?!” That’s a stupid question, Crazy. Of course I love the earth.


Now that we’ve moved away from a place where recycling is as easy as taking out the trash, I’m having a little bit of culture shock. Recycling in a place that doesn’t take it away from your curb as a matter of routine isn’t easy. In fact, it is very inconvenient. You have to dedicate quite a few hours to washing everything, sorting it, squashing it down (if it can be squashed), and hauling it off to a place that will take it away for you. If you don’t want to do all that (understandably), it costs much more than $X per month to have it hauled away from your curb. And even then, most places want you to wash, sort, and squish everything before they come and get it. There are some waste disposal companies in this area who don’t offer to remove recyclables at all.


I think that if it were convenient, many more people would recycle. If every waste disposal company offered it to every one of their customers for free (or at least offered incentives like this company), there wouldn’t be a reason not to recycle.


Eventually, the resources that this planet has will be used up no matter what we do or how much we recycle. That doesn’t mean we should use them up as quickly and wastefully as we can. Recycling is not going to save the earth. But it does help, even if it's just a little. Waste not, want not.