I learned some surprising things about recycling today. One thing I learned was by accident, and the other I read. Neither is good.
An article startled me by reporting that the city of New Orleans does not recycle glass. One of the easiest containers to recycle is composed of glass. It can be recast as a new glass infinitely, and doing so saves the environment not only from landfill accumulation, but from other processes used to create the initial glass product (meaning that since it has been created, repurposing it takes fewer steps). Somebody had the idea of taking glass in the city and turning it into sand to use on beaches and to fill sandbags. However, before this idea came about, tons of glass probably ended up in a pile someplace.
After reading about this environmental news item, I started preparing breakfast, which included a mandarin orange. Little citrus products like lemons, limes and clementines, as well as avocados, usually appear in the grocer housed several to a bag; these bags are made of a finely spun plastic which is not recyclable. To access the items, the bags are ripped apart with superhuman strength, or cut.
I don’t like using scissors to cut those plastic mesh bags. The threads are woven into loops so tiny, that one cut can send a bunch of miniscule snippets onto the counter. They also cling to the blades of the scissors.
I don’t know about some people, but I use a wet paper towel to mop up those small pieces, but they don’t always surrender to this process.
When I retrieved my mug of tea, I was shocked to find, floating atop my creamer, a tiny red plastic mesh bag snippet. Considering how clean I keep my prep space, this was an unexpected revelation. I still don’t know how it got there, but at least I didn’t consume it.
This is the kind of incident which jolts the mind into the reality of what we are doing to our environment. Imagine one of those fine snippets finding its way out of the runoff from a landfill, into the rivulets leading to the streams and lakes and rivers, only to make a home in the catfish Uncle Henry brings home for dinner. You probably won’t see or recognize it at that stage, but you are likely to ingest it. It has been proven that microscopic plastics are ending up in the bowels of our wildlife.
Of course, I plucked the small red snippet out of my tea mug and carried on, but it’s a reminder of what is happening in our world , due in no small part to our ignorance of our waste problem.
If one person throws out one mesh bag a week that is not recycled, when you figure there are over 300 million people in this country, and add to those bags the number of other plastics that don’t receive any attention except to throw them on a pile, the results are staggering.
There are paper mesh products which could just as easily hold produce, and would degrade in a landfill or even go out with your paper, bottle and can recycling.
The oceans and open space we condemn to hold waste materials will not last forever. Instead of turning our backs on the issue, we should hold the creators of these wasteful products to task to come up with a better solution.
The recent extreme weather is just a sample of what we can expect if we don’t stop now. Our oceans are rising because people are dumping waste in there to “make it go away.” Those days are coming to an end. It seems the piper is holding out his hat, and we’re not putting the money where it needs to go. The time has come to make more responsible uses of our glass and plastics.
We can’t stomach any of it, but we need the guts to fix it.
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