By now, I can hear many of you shouting "ooooooh-ooooooh-ooooooh!!! Pick me! Pick me!", like you were in junior high math class. You know what Answer Number Four is, don't you? Yep, it's recycling. Yeah, it's a great idea. But there's a few problems with it, or it would already be the answer, and I wouldn't be writing this.
The first problem is money. The "Scientific Community", (remember them? They're the ones who want to burn the trash or send it to Jupiter...), says that 90% of all city and industrial refuse could be recycled in some way. The problem is that true and complete recycling is often expensive, more expensive than profit margins might support. That would leave YOU once again holding the proverbial financial bag, just like burning. These science guys like to spend your money.
The second problem is that tricky phrase, "true and complete recycling". The "Scientific Community", (yeah, them again), tells us that recycling glass and aluminum, when done cheaply, creates almost as much pollution as making the stuff from scratch. And since we're not going to run out of Bauxite, the main component in aluminum, or sand, the main component in glass, any time soon, recycling the stuff may not make much sense. Of course, that still leaves us with the problem of what to do with all the used bottles and cans...
The third problem with recycling is human nature. The truth about recycling is that it really doesn't work very well except on either a really small scale, or a really large scale. I mean really large, like just about everybody. And human beings, as a species, are mostly lazy and cheap. We love convenience, we are enamored with being the Disposable Society, and we don't really want to shell out much cash for these sins. We like having our trash picked up at the curb, and we don't want to think about it much more than making out the monthly check for fifteen bucks or so. There will always be that segment of the population who are psyched to recycle, but there will probably always be a larger segment that doesn't want to be bothered. It has always been the biggest problem with recycling. Getting people to do it.
And so, we return to the original question. What do you want to do with the trash? Look, I think it's great that we want to protect ourselves from ourselves. But if you are going to say, "Don't do that or that or that", you have to finish the sentence with "Do this". You have to have some kind of an answer. And I'm not hearing one from either side of the fence.
Richard R. Smith is a resident of Winnemucca.
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