We get constant messages about recycling. It’s trendy. It fits with our culture’s current interest in all things green. This is great, but there’s more to the story than today’s social tag lines. You really should reduce, reuse, and recycle, but you should also know more than just a few bullet-point facts?
Garbage – our accumulation of waste material – has been an issue as long as people have been living in groups. A long time, suffice it to say. Athens established a city dump back in 400 B.C. The Romans created the first sanitation force around 200 B.C. Two men walked along the streets, picking up the trash and throwing it into a wagon. Seems that people too lazy to find a trash can have been around a long time…
Before the industrial revolution, collecting and melting down scraps of metal was common in Europe. The British even reused the dust and ash from fires as a base material for brick making. (Reusing dust: that’s some recycling ingenuity.) It made sense economically to reuse rather than continually search for more raw material.
Various shortages during world wars have created new platforms for recycling messages, and the patriotic-recycling campaigns have resulted in many long-term programs. That’s one good effect of the wars. The bad outweighs; it was during World War II that the plastics industry began the kind of increased production of nylon, polyethylene, polystyrene, polyester, PET and silicones that have largely led to our habit of “use it and toss it.”
Basically, our trash history is this: we use stuff, such as food, but we don’t use up all of it. We eat a banana, have a banana peel left. Wear a hole in a sock, still have most of the sock left. But it’s useless, we think.
We’ve always had stuff left over at the end of the day, but it’s only in the last 100 years or so that we’ve created so many disposable but undecomposable commodities. Think about drinking a cup of coffee at a restaurant pre-1900: the waitress puts coffee grounds in a metal filter over a metal or ceramic pot, pours hot water (heated over a fire) over the grounds, and then serves you the beverage in a ceramic, glass, or metal mug, with a cloth napkin, metal utensils, and glass or ceramic cream pitcher and sugar pot.
Today: the waitress puts coffee grounds in a paper filter over a glass (or metal, maybe) pot, flips the switch, the electric coffee makers heats and drips water through the grounds, and then you receive your steaming hot coffee in a paper cup. With a paper slip on it to protect your hand, a paper napkin to wipe up spills, a plastic spoon to stir in your sugar from a paper packet and your cream from a miniature plastic cup sealed with foil.
My, how things have changed.
Visit tomorrow for more on the philosophy of recycling.
Image Credits: mikefats’ photostream.
