Author: Terry Stibal
Date: 2007-01-25 14:00
It's easy for anyone to suggest such a program, but for the people that have to implement it, it's quite another thing.
My wife was a long suffering teacher in a large metropolitan school district that maintained that same philosophy. After fifteen years of "It'll only take five minutes or so a day" additions to her duties, she was working a solid hour a day longer to try and crowd it all in.
Nickel and dime additions eventually aggregate to dollars once you have enough of them, and employers are already trying to cut labor costs as it is. Coming up with another "good idea" to implement that's going to impact their costs isn't going to be welcomed. When they translate into higher prices, many vote with their pocketbooks and opt to keep them in place rather than do the "right thing".
There have been many attempts to eliminate plastics from the waste stream, but the unfortunate truth is that they are the best material (both in suitability and in costs) for the job. Our huge stream of rusting tin coated cans has been cut down to near the 5% level of that of forty years ago by the advent of plastic, and for 99% of the population, that was a very good thing indeed. We (as a culture) dislike plastic precisely for the very qualities that we value it for - a dilemma indeed...
(In Africa, the story goes that one of the most valuable possessions that a poor family can own is a plastic pail. It replaces the earthenware jugs that are used to draw and carry water, and it frees women from the drudgery of making multiple trips each day to keep a family alive. (The pails are light enough that a child can do the same work.) Even good old HDPE milk jugs are prizes in those cultures, while here all that we can do is grind them up to make fake lumber. One man's trash is another man's treasure and all of that...)
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a waster of any resource, I don't litter (in fact, I "anti-litter" as my wife and I harvest aluminum cans during our daily exercise walks), and I don't go out of my way to avoid recycling. We are prodigious consumers of newsprint (my wife "takes" no less than four different newspapers, as well as a few weeklies), but we carefully recycle every page of the stuff.
(That there is so little need for it by industry is one of the best-kept secrets - much if not all of the recycled newsprint in this area ends up landfilled, despite all of that effort.)
However, there are limits of reasonable efforts in every endeavor, and until the Vandorn holders are identified, you can't pitch them in the right bin. That's a manufacturing issues (one that I would have thought that the EU would have long ago addressed, which leads me to believe that their "power" isn't as much as some over there claim), not one that we can influence.
leader of Houston's Sounds Of The South Dance Orchestra
info@sotsdo.com
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