Yesterday, I got a shipment from Walmart. It was a heavy box, made up of sports drinks — the ones with electrolytes and all that other good stuff in them. I have to drink them. Not that I like them. Nobody likes them. it. It’s not horrible, but it is not delicious, either, no matter what they tell you on television.
I have a low blood sodium issue, so I can’t drink water or fruit juice. I can only have two cups of coffee, which in my world is one very big cup, and after that, I have to drink that goop. If I don’t, my feet and hands cramp up, my gut knots, and eventually, I will die. I don’t know if this is a common thing or not, but I’ve got it and have to deal with it.
The thing is, the bottles came in a crate big enough to carry me, Garry and all the dogs. I know it was heavy, but more than half the crate was full of plastic air bubble packing, which was barely enough to keep the bottles from rolling around.
It took me a long time to cut up the crate. Longer than it did to unpack and store its contents. This is not unusual.
Along the shore – where all the garbage lives
I don’t recycle. Why not?
Because no one has any use for the recycling and the trash people pay to have it taken away. It used to go to India or other parts out there where they still used it, but they too have run out of viable uses, so it basically goes on trucks and lives there, moving from truck to truck, or from womb to tomb as they say in the trash business.
I know this because I wrote a manual for software for recycling hazardous waste. That was more than 10-years ago, so I’m sure the situation has not improved.
There is a mountain, a monsoon of recyclables we’ve created. We are gullible enough to believe by recycling, we are in some way fixing our environment.
We aren’t. We’re just moving trash from here to there and then back again. The problem is not recycling. The problem is there is too much trash and nothing to be done with it. There is no giant hole in the earth where the garbage goes. That’s why so much of it winds up in our lakes, rivers, and oceans, and woods.
As I was cutting up that huge box, I thought: “Why do they do this? Why do they over-package everything? Surely there must be a better way?”
As long as we keep creating more trash than we can ever use, reuse, bury or burn, the world will keep getting dirtier, smellier, and uglier. This is not intended to encourage you to throw trash in the road or woods, but to make you recognize we have not found a solution to the trash problem. If everybody on earth recycled, we’d still have the same mess.
We need to create less mess.
We need to stop over packaging everything. We need to create and use bio-degradable packaging, so it becomes soil and not more trash. Plastic bottles don’t need to be plastic. There are other substances which will degrade, but they cost more than plastic.
Ultimately, if we want to live in this world and not be up to our hips in our own rubble, we are going to have to pay for the privilege. Everything can’t be delivered in huge containers because that’s the only box someone could find that day. Containers need to be as small as possible for items. Boxes need to be recyclable. Every little thing does not need a big box with a plastic wrapper.
Our gullibility is such that we think recycling is the magic key to getting rid of the monsoon of trash. The truth is, nowhere remains to put the garbage. Nowhere on this earth.
The whole recycling game is how we fool ourselves into believing we’ve found a solution when what we’ve found is another way to move trash around. This may sound like a minor problem until one day, your city or town doesn’t have anyplace to send their trash and you find yourself living in it.
I somehow doubt shooting it out into space is going to work out, either. I have a mental image of our spaceships trying to forge their way through huge rings of trash encircling the earth.
The garbage of space.
Now there’s a sexy sci-fi book for the future!
