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OPINION: Send my bottles somewhere else
Jul 01, 2009 (The Wenatchee World - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
I confess. I am a recycling skeptic.
Oh, I do it. I go through all the necessary motions. I separate the cans and bottles and stack up my mixed waste paper and haul it out to the blue bin when my wife tells me, but I admit that at times doubt enters my mind. My faith falters. I wonder, am I really helping save the planet or is some of this stuff just a big pile of empty symbolism? In other words, a waste.
I feel enormous guilt over this. It is my fault, I know. I fret. I feel the heavy weight of my personal failings. I take it seriously when the kid on television points her finger and tells me to "quit trashing our Earth." But when I take my brown glass beverage containers out to the alley and drop them in the correct plastic bin with my other seperated waste stream, every once in a while a small, faint voice comes into the back of my mind and asks, "What good is this?"
I know the theories. Recycling glass saves energy. There are dozens of sites on the Web that will tell you about the huge mass of BTUs glass manufacturers save by using recycled raw materials. I hope that's true. But Waste Management sends an extra truck to my alley every week to take my bottles away. They are washed and sorted and crushed somewhere, I know not, and then loaded on another truck and taken to a processor near Seattle, where some of it might be sorted again and put on another truck for California. A good share might end up as road ballast. We truck a bottle over the pass to replace a rock under some asphalt somewhere. How much energy are we saving doing that?
But oh, we save precious space in the landfill. Last I checked reyclable glass was less than 2 percent of the county's solid waste, and our landfill has an expected life of 80 years even while it contemplates accepting trash from all over North America. Saving space, but not a lot.
And my doubts expanded even more reading about the glass of Cashmere. The city recycling center has been taking glass bottles from the faithful for years, but according to Rick Steigmeyer's piece in last weekend's World, it was quietly crushing and burying it. There was no place to take it. Nobody wanted it. So all those people who thought they were saving the planet and saving space in the landfill were just having their glass buried in secret.
This might upset me if glass wasn't made out of dirt. It's mostly silicon, of course ... sand, the same stuff my entire neighborhood is built on. From sand glass comes, and to sand it shall return. The people in Cashmere shouldn't be too upset. Burying glass is pure recycling. You put it back where it came from. Saves trucking to Seattle, too. And if you think glass bottlemakers can save a whole lot of energy by using the stuff we send out for recycling, just wait for them to buy some of it. It will be a very long wait, and that should tell you something.
Glass recycling can make you feel good, if you keep the right frame of mind. I watched an episode of "This Old House" recently. They were building a super environmentally friendly house in Texas, making everything as green as it could possibly be. They had some really neat ideas and saved a lot of energy and water, which was great. Then the homeowner bought beautiful kitchen countertops made from cement and recycled bottles. Very cool. They were trucked to Texas from a factory in Brooklyn, N.Y. Everyone was very happy. But, saving energy? I doubt it.
Relax, recyclers. A lot of recycling is obviously worthwhile. Recycling aluminum and many metals saves a lot. Until the recession there was a big demand for waste paper for recycling. Ton after ton went to China, probably made into boxes and sold back to us. The market for most recyclables has not been good in the last year -- supply exceeds demand -- but that's the way it goes with non-perishable commodities. And, rest easy, I'll keep tossing my bottles in the recycling bin if it makes you feel better.
Tracy Warner's column appears Tuesday through Friday. He can be reached at warner@wenworld.com or 665-1163.
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