The Saturday Morning EnviromentalistTrying To Do The Right ThingI care about the environment. I am not a tree-hugger and I am not ready to convert my race car to bio-mass fuel, but I try to do the right thing when disposing of used motor oil or when choosing between paper and plastic at the grocery store. So early on a Saturday morning last weekend, my wife and I decided it was time to take the large pile of cardboard boxes left over from our recent move to the country to the local recycling center. The stack was big enough so that putting it on the curbside seemed excessive, and as it wouldn't fit into any of our cars or my compact SUV, it was clear we would need to use the truck.
Everyone should have a truck. A big truck. I know this is a concept that makes real environmentalists shudder, but there is nothing like a full-sized American pickup truck when you need to move something big or a lot of small somethings. My truck, a 1999 Dodge Ram with a V10 engine, gets very little actual use. Aside from the odd hauling trip, the only thing I ever use it for is pulling my race-car trailer around the country, as it has enough torque to slow the rotation of the earth if I drive it in the wrong compass heading. It will cruise all day long at 70 mph with a substantial enclosed trailer in its wake, and I have to constantly remind myself the trailer is even back there. Anyway, it didn't take long to load the stack of flattened cardboard into the bed of my big red truck, and off we went to the recycling center located behind the city fire station. The truck had just a quarter tank of gas in it, but we had to go only about 3 miles each way. It seemed like plenty.
Things are never as simple as they seem. As soon as we arrived at the long line of green dumpsters, I knew something was wrong. There was a dumpster for aluminum cans and one for plastic bottles. There was a dumpster for glass and another for newspapers. But where had the largest dumpster gone, the one dedicated to cardboard boxes? We got out and walked the row, but none of the big green bins allowed cardboard. My red truck was filled with boxes, and for some reason someone had decided I couldn't recycle them here. My wife and I looked at each other while scratching our heads. Then she remembered another recycling center behind another fire station in the next town over. I eyed the gas gauge and decided we had just enough to make the trip, even with the big V10's voracious appetite for fuel. We set out for the next recycling center.
Was it a conspiracy? Had all fire stations removed their cardboard recycling bins? Were cardboard boxes no longer in demand? Do Saturday morning recycling yuppies no longer use boxes when they move? Why was I not informed?
We sat in the parking lot of the fire station in the neighboring town and tried to come up with a plan. I figured if we burned the boxes in the back yard, we would produce less pollution than we were creating by driving my huge pickup truck all over the county. I knew of only one more recycling center, a phalanx of dumpsters located in a small park in the heart of the city near our old neighborhood. My wife suggested if we were heading in that direction anyway, we may as well stop at the hardware store and pick up a few things for the yard and some salt for the water softener. It was only a little out of the way. The first place had barely half of what we needed, so it was on to another smaller hardware store, just a bit further afield. Two stops and $140 worth of gloves, grass seed, water softener salts and an aeration pump timer later, we were back on the recycling trail.