Cans and Boxes and Catalogues

It's Sunday morning. In an hour or so I'll load the pickup for the recycling run. We live in the county so we don't have a blue curbside container tended by city sanitation workers on a regular weekly schedule. It's up to us. We make the decision-throw it away and watch it disappear from our lives in a black plastic garbage bag, or keep it around for a week until one of us remembers to haul it off. It's do it yourself out here in the land of libertarians, low taxes, and freedom from civic services like sewer and garbage.

I'll pull up to the containers on Fernwood-Glendale Road and sort through our three bins from the "recycling center" we've sat up in the mud room-one for glass, plastic, and aluminum, another for newspapers and the reams of catalogues, exhausted magazines, and scrap paper we accumulate each week; the last for cereal and snack boxes, a virtual mountain when the boys are home, a mole hill when it's just the two of us.

I like the people I see there as well. It's hard to predict who will show up with a trunk full of bottles, cans, and papers, but by their bumper sticker I will know them. There are Kerry Democrats, Right to Lifers, and "W in 2005" Republicans. All types recycle, so there's hope.

Recycling is something we've actually learned to look forward to, even though at first it was a little too much like my mom saying "clean up your room" when I was a kid. I've learned to like the ritual-glass here, paper there, cardboard flattened and slipped through the slot-and I've also learned to like the idea that every load of recyclables we take to the county's bins is one more load that that does not end up adding a few inches in altitude to some regional landfill, some trash mountain in someone's backyard.

My weekly recycling run is my little personal revolution against conspicuous consumption. Every cereal box that's not hauled to some poor end of some South Carolina county and buried at a handsome profit by Waste Management or Republic is one more pine tree not processed into cardboard, one more useless item pressed back into community service by the people, for the people.

It occurs to me as I drive to the recycling center each week that waste and its management is a little like the tobacco industry thirty years ago-a very profitable industry based on people's laziness and addiction. The addiction is to convenience, to paying someone else for easy solutions to difficult problems. How do we rid our houses of our household trash? How do we disappear all the garbage that at comes out of Spartanburg County each week? We pay someone to do it for us-whether through private fees or taxes. We fill our trash cans with whatever it is we do not want and bargain with an industry to haul it away. We don't care were it goes. It's gone. It's not our management problem anymore.

It was worse in the past. In the not so distant decades most people out in the country took their garbage and threw it in the nearest gully. Some out in my neck of the woods still believe that's the solution to garbage collection-find a low place and fill it up. You can see the black bags of trash tossed off bridges, the old sofas hauled to remote roads and abandoned in the piny woods.

In the early 1960s, city garbage was not hidden in black plastic bags but was collected, can by can, in dump trucks and hauled, load by load, to city dumps. Then it was deposted there and "recycled" by the poor before being burned. My uncle remembers building a whole bicycle from parts found at the city dump, and that one neighbor knew the exact spot where the out-of-date candy was purged each week from the local five and dime. Once the kids found out the Hershey bars and Milky Ways arrived on Tuesday they couldn't resist. It takes a long time for a candy bar to go bad. It seemed worth the risk.

Not working on recycling as a primary value is a bad management practice. I understand why the big corporations don't encourage it. It's for a similar reason the oil companies want new energy sources brought on line slowly. They like our laziness. Profit is a powerful motivator-even for something that, in the end, is such a good idea as renewable resources-like cereal boxes and soft drink cans.

The next time you hear a politician tell us we have a looming trash problem in Spartanburg County and we need to let some big corporation come into our rural southern end and slap a 1,000 acre regional landfill next door to our neighbors, just remind them how dismal our recycling rate is-9%, the lowest rate among metropolitan counties in South Carolina.

Tell them recycling's a good thing and really pretty easy to do. I'm headed out right now with my cans and boxes and catalogues. Let's meet down at the recycling center.