20080306 Feedback on my columns about recycling and solid waste management

Feedback on my columns about recycling and solid waste management

March 6^th, 2008

A colleague emailed me the other day with the following feedback on my columns advocating recycling as the ultimate solution to solid waste management in Carroll County.

They wrote:

Nice read on trash. I was very interested in your take regarding recycling. Do you believe that we have done a notable job over the last 12 years of improving our recycling efforts in Carroll County? I think our campaign (countywide) has been minimal. I wonder what it would be like to have a someone with “fire in their belly” ( a recycling czar, so to speak). Give that person one to two years and a charge to increase recycling and initiate programs that promote reduction and reuse. What do you think about that?

After I sent the following, I called this person up and reiterated, that above and beyond whatever artistic licenses I took with my response; that yes indeed, Carroll County needs a person on staff to take the lead on increasing our recycling rate in Carroll County and then I emphasized that it needs to be the right person.

After the initial feedback from folks who sorta–kinda “questioned” recycling, many folks got back with me to say that I made my point and reaction since has been favorable.

Anyway, pasted below is my response. Please enjoy…

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March 5^th, 2008

Ever since the 1988 Maryland Recycling Act, which mandated a 20 percent recycling rate; increasing the recycling rate has been a tough nut everywhere. Sure, there is always an anomaly here or there that demonstrates great success. It is almost always an example for which many Carroll Countians cannot relate.

Feedback from some readers is that they don’t care what California is doing, they’re against it.

In the Sunday Eagle column I am on deadline for as I keyboard, I note that Germany, with the strictest environmental regulations in the world, only has a recycling rate of 55%.

In a German Federal Ministry for the Environment study in September 2005, it reported, in part: “In the eighties of the previous century, waste incineration plants came to be the symbol of environmental contamination… Today, more than half of all household waste (55%) is recycled… Since June 1, 2005, untreated waste is no longer landfilled. And because of stringent regulations waste incineration plants are no longer significant in terms of emissions of dioxins, dust, and heavy metals…”

Besides, from 1988 to 1998, recycling was so cost prohibitive that many jurisdictions simply could not afford to maintain an appropriate recycling initiative. Bear in mind, it has taken us four decades, since the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, to get our rate to 30 percent.

Let’s re-begin with a tenor and a tone about how well we’ve done, now let’s improve upon it; and here’s some pragmatic, practical, real-life ways you can help.

Of course, one of the drivers in the near future could be the municipalities. Those jurisdictions are closer to their citizens and the increased tipping fees will be a great incentive. That said, what is the incentive for folks outside the town limits?

A “recycling Czar?” It needs to be the correct person… and a different approach…

The anecdotal feedback that I have received from last week’s column is that the current condescending, arrogant, preachy, breathless, and emotional advocacy for composting and recycling is paradoxically turning folks off.

One person told me that watching the environmental advocacy on Ch 24 is like inviting their ex-wife into their living room to screech at him about how flawed he is, with no hope of redemption.

The numbing repetition of claims of doom and gloom, followed by claims and counter-claims has created uncertainty to the point that folks are throwing up their arms in despair. Folks have told me that the only truth they know is that their taxes just got raised, they can’t afford to put gas in the car or pay to heat their homes, there worried about their job security, and commuting is from hell.

Then they said: “You’re now going to jack me up over whether or not I put my trash in the correct container? Or I’m supposed to go put on a pair of overhauls and run a compost pile in my back yard and save the world – get out of my face, I’m late to go pick up my kids.”

It’s analogous to the guy who told he never thought much about the airport until he saw the folks who are against it in action and now he wholeheartedly supports expanding the airport.

It’s got to be the right person. I need someone with a NASCAR tattoo on one arm, and an American flag on the other, a pick-up truck with a gun rack, and a cigarette dangling out of his mouth to share with folks in Carroll County that recycling is American and not some alternative agenda of Code Pink.

After I file my next column, it will be my fifth column in a row about the value of recycling and doing something different with solid waste other than throwing it in a hole. Then, I sure hope I find a topic like NASCAR drivers who hunt bears in their free time with a bow and arrow and Ted Nugent in their 8-track stereo...

Meanwhile, sorry I was held back in my candid analysis by my shriveled but nevertheless functional sense of decency…