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RECYCLING: THE NEXT GENERATION © 1998 - 2001 Joyce K. Meyer. All Rights Reserved. Long before recycling was "politically correct," before my mother's generation dealt with the Depression, or even my grandmother's generation, there was a significant segment of the population that was already recycling. They didn't think of it as recycling--for them it was "waste-not, want-not." It wasn't a noble philosophy, it was a way of life--and still is…. Farmer's are the original recyclers--well, not counting nature herself. Most obvious, perhaps, is the farmer's use of livestock manure to fertilize the fields. Old stalks we either plowed back into the ground or run through a chopper and used for fodder. Dried and stripped corn cobs could be used for kindling the hearth fires, I've even know of old farm and city homes in New England where the old dried and stripped remains were used inside the lathe and plaster walls as insulation. Even Native Americans were farmers and used gourds to make storage and eat/cooking implements. The farmer's wife knew a thing-or-two; in the kitchen she'd save some of the scraps from her cookin' meals to feed the chickens or pigs. What wasn't consumed and "recycled" by those means when into the heap at the corner of the garden to create "brown-gold," otherwise known as compost. Those old feed sacks were plenty good for fixin' up as a dish towel, some of the prettier ones might have even made it into the clothes or linen closet as jumpers and pinafores or quilts for the long cold winters. If you were a fairly shrewd and creative person you could invent a second use for almost anything. Old storm windows became lids for coldframes; wood salvaged from an old building might become a worktable in its second life. Bald tires were great water hole swings. Even a fan blade might re-emerge as a cultivating tool, and strips of metal from old tractors were used to reinforce wooden structures. Nothing was brought onto the farm that couldn't be reused or easily "gotten rid of" because there were no city dumps. If you didn't want it or need it anymore, you couldn't just "throw it out." If you had a curb, and set the garbage out, that's where it would stay. Recycling isn't new; we just look at it differently now, have a fancy name for it, and have modern materials we must learn to deal with. Gone are the days when the "rag man" made his rounds. So too, the milkman, who would stop by for the empties and replace them with dairy fresh products. Now it's the "garbageman" that arrives once a week and all our troublesome trash magically disappears, but to where? -- To the ever growing, already enormous landfills, of course. Is there anyone that wants to live within a mile of one of these man-made monsters? YUK! But, if we choose to recycle we must take our discards to a central collection location. A bit more effort is need to deal with those no-deposit, no return bottles, cans, etc. Right now, in our area, recycling is a choice--not so, in many states. Many already have deposit and return programs and laws. In New Jersey where my sister lives, for example, you can be fined if aluminum cans are found in your curbside garbage. The day when we will be required by law to use the deposit and return system is not far off. Besides balking at the labor and time to recycle, some may wonder how much good we are really doing when we are burning fossil fuels and polluting the air when we drive to the recycling center? Recycling still reduces the amount of raw materials that have to be mined from the earth, and it's still more efficient to re-manufacture aluminum cans than collect the bauxite and extract the aluminum. But there are other reasons too. For me, the value in recycling cans, glass, plastic, and paper is in knowing that I am not contributing to the tonnage and volume in the landfills. By doing my little part to recycle I am preserving just a bit more landfill space for my son's generation and future generations.
(By-the-way, I'm anti litter too. God doesn't dump his trash in my living room
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