Sunday, June 21, 2009

Recycling

Coming from a place like Seattle, where recycling is pretty much ingrained into most everyone nowadays, it's hard to deal with people who think completely different about waste. It's even hard to imagine, when going to other places, how little gets recycled and how much less is offered in the way of recycling in other cities/states/countries.

In some places I've been, it's just terrible. Some places have practically no recycling, or at the least, no consumers with a mind towards recycling. I can look a little crazy digging through the garbage to pull out what seems to be garbage and I'm not very fond of doing that, per se, haha...

I have recently started working at Seattle Center, where recycling was never very big in the sense that there has not been a whole lot of recycling receptacles around the park grounds. There was mostly cardboard and garbage and recycling bins would come out during festivals to collect cans and bottles. People have apparently grown accustomed to this (mostly employees and people who frequent the grounds) and much goes unrecycled. Now, there are numerous receptacles for cans and bottles, plastic, glass and aluminum! I was excited to see this upon starting to work back at the amusement park, as I always wanted this to happen! I was a little sad at the little usage these bins get. People are still just used to taking the easy way and throwing everything in the garbage, it seems, unless it is just as convenient with a recycling bin equally as close or closer. So many cans and bottles are just thrown into the garbage and it always pains me just a little bit to see it. I AM now getting paid to hang around the grounds of the Seattle Center all day long again, so I figure that I am a little more justified in digging through the trash or at the very least, picking up the recyclables before the street sweepers come through in the morning and just sweep them into the trash.

I was/am working on trying to get a bill for a water bottle deposit for Seattle, so that people would be paying an upfront added deposit on water bottles and that deposit would be returnable on recycling the bottle. I think it might be a better idea to try to push with a deposit on all cans and bottles. This ensures much higher recycling rates in states where this deposit is in place. It creates jobs and reduces waste and energy usage. While I keep working on this bill writing very slowly, I think I'm hoping that someone else with more and/or better experience will jump in, haha! I do need to start pushing harder at at least writing up the stuff necessary to possibly put it together enough to put on the desks of local politicians!

2 comments:

fantastic said...

can you add a follower widget please??

Sione said...

Umm, maybe?