Debris is Everyone’s Problem

I live in the pristine high mountains of Colorado part of the year. Trash is nowhere nearly as plentiful as it is around my city digs. Perhaps that makes it all the more noticeable. It jars the scenery by its singular intrusion. Whether near or far, I’m always on trash patrol. I think it’s one of our responsibilities as citizens of this much-stressed planet. If we can make our surroundings easier on the eye of someone with enough ugliness in his life, I’d like to do that.
 

Out in Colorado, we pick up what we see, and even in the frontier, we have an adopt-a-road program. Mostly we get beer and soda cans and fast-food wrappers. It may also be leftover markers and gel packets from a trail race. Whatever shouldn’t be there, we try to pick up. Sometimes I have a pack llama to carry it for me!

 

Back in the city, with trash everywhere, I developed a mandate. If I see a discarded plastic bag (and who doesn’t on a daily basis?) I take it as a sign I should fill it with trash and deposit it in a trash can.  

Everyone’s living situation is different. What would be really cool is for all of us to set up a game plan for trash remediation where we live and work. Some of the ideas I’ve heard:

• Get a group of co-workers or friends to schedule a bi-monthly trash patrol around your area for a couple hours and then end at a favorite coffee house for fun and conversation

• Sign up for an adopt-a-street program and make it a family affair or a memorial project for someone who was a great citizen. Erect a sign in their honor.

• Pick up trash as part of a service organization service project, in honor of Martin Luther King Day or for your university.

• Make that your contribution to Earth Day every year.

 

• As a manager at a business, sponsor a contest with employee teams as to which team can pick up the most trash on their lunch hour around the business with fun, edible prizes. You’ll have the added benefit of increasing the activity level of your employees.

Most of all, really care about where you live and work and help it be the best it can be.

Spring Blitz

It's getting close to spring. In St. Louis all the daffodils are out and it's the first week of March--strange. Up along side the daffodils is all the trash a city seems to sprout continuously. Time to think about cleaning up your home turf. We have something called Operation Brightside, a volunteer effort supported by the city to organize all the wards into blocks with block captains. I'm the block captain for our area and one weekend in April, we clean. The city supplies garbage bags and picks up the trash and heavy items on a certain weekend for each ward.

One year, we got our alumni association to help us clean up our neighborhood because it coincided with our university day of service. This year, we're probably on our own.

Think about where you live and see if you have such a program. If not, organize one. Get your neighbors together one morning in early spring to clean up, plant flowers, just make your neighborhood a better place to live. It doesn't take that much work, and it's a great way to teach your kids about civic mindedness and pride in neighborhood.

In Colorado, we have a similar program. The Colorado Department of Transportation enlists neighborhood associations to clean up along local highways. We go out three times a year, wearing reflective vests and toting showy garbage bags to spruce up the area. C-DOT picks up the trash bags. Within our association, we have an adopt-a-road program to keep those picked up. It would be great to sit back and complain about the trash. I'd rather pick it up and have a place to live I can be proud of. Think about it.

White Plastic Bags in Winter

White plastic grocery bags blend with the snow--to a point. But the shape give them away. Snow is flat and covers the ground with its pristine veneer, while plastic bags give themselves away by blowing in the wind, as if to remind us of their flagrant trashy nature. Even when you can't pick them up and fill them with trash, still, pick them up. They aren't snow and no one is fooled.

Trash knows no season. Neither, then, should our efforts to create a neighborhood we can be proud of.

Proper Waste Disposal

If you are like me, you go through sporatic clearings of stuff, whether papers, files, cosmetics and hair products no longer used--anything to feel less hemmed in. The trick to being effective at one of these spring/fall/whenever cleanings is to get organized. You'll do yourself and the environment a favor.

Step 1: Set a finite area to clear that's not too overwhelming, like the master bathroom cabinets

Step 2: Have two bags handy: one for trash and one for recycle. Don't get lazy on this one. You just have to rinse out those half-used bottles to recycle them.

Step 3: Reuse or recycle: Left over shampoo you no long like, or it has sulfates and you can't use it on your straight hair, can be poured into hand dispensers and used for handwashing. Check environmental websites to see what should NOT be emptied down the drain.

Step 4: Get rid of outdated prescriptions, but don't flush them down the toilet. More and more, we are finding escalating amounts of drugs in our drinking water and streams. Unless it specifically says to flush, and very few drugs do, adulterate them so they can't be used and put them in the trash.

Step 5: Durable goods you no longer want can be donated to a charity--like that curling iron you never got the hang of, or the humidifier you never use.

Sept 6: Separate business papers into those with personal information that need shredding and those you can recycle.

Then just do it. YOu will feel so free that you have cleaned out all those drawer and cabinet hoggers. And you will probably feel more like tackling that file cabinet in your office.

Mr. Foster, Please Go Away

We live in one of the most beautiful unspoiled places in the U.S., high in the Colorado Rockies. In the summer, the wildflowers knock your socks off. In the fall, the aspens glow with gold against the rocks and deep green of the conifers. Also ubiquitous are the beer cans someone drops into the gully across from our driveway most weekdays. So going out for a walk means coming home with the beer cans to put into the recycle bin.

This guy who prefers Foster's Ale and his friends who drink a variety of other brews either live or work up here. So why do they think trashing the place is okay? Why do they think their mother will be there to pick up after them? I considered posting a sign asking them why they are doing this. My husband thinks if I did that, he may give us all his trash just to make a point. He's probably right. Anyone who would do this everyday is living un unconscious life. I don't even want to think about him drinking and driving.

So unless we catch them in the act, the only thing we can do is continue to pick up the cans, the bags, the fast food wrappers so we can continue to enjoy living in this paradise and give it the respect it deserves.

A Much Overdue Blog Entry

I could say I’ve been away, and I have, but even then I could have done something. What I could have done wouldn’t have had the impact as this PowerPoint presentation emailed to me by a friend. Check this out, and after you watch it, if you aren’t recycling every possible thing you can, then we’re in worse trouble than we thought.
Google this to get the astounding show: what_is_this_made_of.pps

Differences Around the World

Every country, every city, every neighborhood has different priorities with regard to the environment. In our neighborhood in the city, I can pick up a big bag of trash everyday in front of our townhouse complex. Next day, I go out and do it again. Trash seems to come up like grass. When we go to Mexico, trash is in huge piles. In African villages, any hole becomes a trash dump; no pretty trucks coming by on a regular schedule to pick it up. In Asia, we’ve got heavy air pollution, water pollution, but we’re pretty good about trash.

In Taiwan and in Shanghai, we saw small boats with the daily job of scooping trash out of the water in the harbor. Walking through neighborhoods anywhere in China, we saw virtually no trash. On the historic Bund on Shanghai harbor, every few yards are these helpful containers, encouraging people to recycle. We saw them everywhere in major cities. You just can’t breathe the air.