Different Note
Waste not, want not
Recently, while brushing my teeth, the faucet was on and I saw the water cycle firsthand: water pumping out of my well and running right back down the drain.
I don't do that any more. Oh, I brush; I just don't waste water.
When I grocery shop (admittedly not often), I return home with a plethora of plastic bags filled with more plastic and paper containers. It's time I get some big 'green' canvas bags. Not the color, but something reusable that won't hurt the environment.
At work, I eat a fair number of frozen dinners, packaged in plastic containers. Plastic that will never find its way back to the recycling yard, because I throw it into the garbage can when I'm done eating. Off to the landfill it goes.
From here on out I will recycle.
We, as a society, have become wasteful. We are, after all, consumers, a highly appropriate term for us. Merriam-Webster's defines consume: 1: to do away with completely: destroy <fire consumed several buildings> 2 a: to spend wastefully : squander b: use up.
I don't want to be a consumer anymore.
Yet, even in today's ailing economy sometimes it is still cheaper to consume than conserve. Otherwise there would be money in recycling like when I was a kid. Back then we scoured the neighborhood and walked the railroad tracks collecting bottles and cans. We earned cold hard cash, AND we cleaned up the environment.
Now into the landfill go the plastic bottles, which break down into poisonous chemicals that contaminate our water.
It seems in times of surplus people become wasteful. This crazy mindset is insidious and doesn't seem crazy at the time. It is not until something is used up or unaffordable that we become frugal. When fuel was cheap cars got big. And bigger. I've lived in houses smaller than some vehicles I've seen cruise through town.
We have created municipal water plants to provide cheap, clean water to hundreds of millions of people, with the turn of a handle. Nevertheless, companies have cropped up to sell us water in plastic bottles -- often from a municipal water source! I may be going out on a limb here, but isn't it cheaper to fill a bottle with tap water and keep reusing it?
Turns out it is. Bottled water can cost 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water.
"Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere," according to the Container Recycling Institute.
Each year, 5 trillion gallons are shipped internationally. Talk about a carbon footprint.
Is it really cheaper to make new cans and plastic containers than to recycle old ones? It must be. It's all about the money. And we are going to need all that money to clean up the environment and to buy bottled water when the well runs dry.
Some people heat their homes in the winter hotter than they would ever tolerate in the summer. In the summer they cool their homes and cocoon themselves in layers of blankets while they sleep.
Most water heaters run 24/7. And it still takes a ridiculous amount of time for hot water to reach my shower (as it runs down the drain).
Most of our electronics stay on 24/7, even when turned off, burning enough 'phantom' electricity in a year to power Italy.
Yard crews will blow leaves and grass clippings into storm drains, direct conduits into our rivers and springs -- our drinking water. Would these same people pour fertilizer into a glass of water and drink it? I know they would not.
We clear the land to plant non-native grasses and plants that require water and fertilizer and pesticides and mowing. We stuff the clippings and leaves (i.e. fertilizer) into plastic bags and drop them on the curb to be hauled off to the landfill. Then we drive to the store, buy fertilizer and pesticides, douse our yards with chemicals and spray them with our drinking water - sometimes while it is raining - just to keep our crops green.
Yes, I said crops. We have become lawn farmers, tending to crops we can't eat.
We live in the sunshine state yet few Floridians have solar power; I know personally of only one, and he's been using panels he bought 20 years ago.
Think where we'd be now had we started building houses with solar panels during the oil embargo of the 1970s.
We might take better care of our water if it cost as much as gasoline. We might think twice about over-watering lawns or letting toilets run and faucets drip.
Change is coming. Our bad habits will change. We just need to be sure it is on our terms.
I am hopeful. We put people on the moon. We have a space station floating in orbit. We built the Hoover Dam. We can make it right.
Albert Isaac is Editor-in-Chief at Tower Publications. He may be contacted at editor@towerpublications.com.
