Recycling – pain, pleasure, or one’s duty?

I got up early this morning so I could place my two full recycling bins on the street.  The reason I didn’t put them there last night when I placed my trash container on the street was that sometimes the wind will blow the contents out overnight.

recycling bins
recycling bins

Both of my containers were full because I didn’t take them to the street last week.  That’s not unusual due to the fact that I don’t generate that much stuff.  It’s no pain to do this or to separate items when collecting refuse around the house.  I have one bin for plastics and glass, and another for paper and cardboard.

The first time I ran into weekly recycling was when I lived in California and there was a small basket in my apartment you could use to collect items and then transfer them into containers that were down next to the dumpster in the parking lot.  Prior to that all of the recycling I did as a kid was aluminum cans to sell by weight at the recycling center, and deposit bottles that we could return at a local drug store for pocket change.

That’s right, you used to get paid to recycle.  Now it’s required by law in some places and you don’t get paid for it when you place it by your household trash for pickup.  I’m OK with doing it just for the positive effect on the environment as long as the process is easy.  I don’t buy into everything that Al Gore and others have been trying to sell the public with rising seawater and drowning polar bear depictions but I recall a commercial from the Ad Council when I was young.  It had an actor portraying an American Indian in a canoe looking at all of the garbage and litter in America and showed a tear coming down his face.  That made me not want to litter and to control my waste generation, and I still practice that when I can.

I found an article about the commercial and it says it’s one of the 50 greatest commercials of all time.  It also tells a surprising fact about the actor and that was that he was of Italian heritage and not Native American.

That doesn’t change things for me, and neither should it matter whether you believe if global warming is happening and if it is, it’s because of man.  The ideas of treading lightly, not littering, and reducing waste are still good ones, almost 50 years after this commercial first aired.  One of the sayings I learned as a young Boy Scout that we applied during our camping and hiking trips was “Take only pictures, leave only footprints.