Growing up with those fantastic experiences of childhood in the 1950’s, and attending college in the 60’s and 70’s, set the pace for me to be the fully formed adult that I am today. It was me and my baby boomer colleagues that wanted to change the world. And, in many ways, we have.
One noticeable change, and an early predecessor to the Green movement, is that of recycling. Now that we have curbside service, it has become mainstream and even second nature. We have kept tons of usable material out of landfills and given them new life while conserving resources. What could be wrong with that?
Having just a touch of obsessive behavioral traits, the push to repurpose, reuse and recycle has fed into my “dangerous” desire to never throw anything away. My collection of empty plastic cat litter buckets is quite impressive. I have empty coffee cans and baby food jars (the perfect accoutrements for every man’s work bench) that could provide enough raw materials for a small skyscraper. It’s not that it’s clutter, mind you, all of these items have a space and a need that makes them important and able to ward off the inevitable comments from my wife as she wends her way through the maze of my workshop to find me deep in concentration and repurposing.
I’ve made birdhouses and feeders out of old bookcases and cat food cans, a stop for my antique wrought iron gate out of brake pads from a discarded bicycle, and other more esoteric projects in progress that keep material out of the waste stream. Reusing these materials directly instead of turning them into reprocessors may seem a little idealistic, but seeing the volume of material certainly raises one’s awareness of the possibilities.
Living close to a large area of open ground near the intersection of two major highways, I have in just a few short years seen a once popular drive-in theatre site cum dump become a burgeoning mountain of waste equaling the nearby river bluffs. At times, this eyesore glints in the sun from the bottles, cans, foil and metal that could have been reprocessed and turned into new items instead of taking up space and limiting our access to a dwindling supply of domestic natural resources, or, as stated earlier, reused immediately to avoid the tremendous energy requirements to reprocess.
So take those empty spaghetti sauce jars and reuse them. Use them to store some earthworms for that long postponed fishing trip, or better yet, catch some fireflies… a behavior that in another time might have labeled a lone adult racing through the yard as eccentric, but may hearken back to when having enough of everything was never an issue. When neighbors ask, just hold up your shiny glass jar and tell them you’re doing your little bit for immediate recycling and that it’s good for the environment. You don’t need to tell them as you smile and leap through the yard that it’s also good for the soul.