Tennis again, and a recycling rant

The fall tennis flex league starts this week, so tennis will be taking up more time in schedule again for a while. I've only been going to one class a week, and not playing outside of that since the end of July. I have a match today after work, and Benjamin played two matches this weekend. At least the weather is a lot cooler than it was this summer!

In other news... I thought I had read an announcement that our local public works was going to be distributing new recycling bins this fall that would hold a lot of recyclables and wouldn't require sorting, like my parents have in Bellevue. Can I tell you how much I want this? A lot. Currently, the only recycling Maumelle has curbside is newspapers and aluminum cans. Totally useless to me - we don't get a newspaper, and don't use many cans. You can take other recyclables to the recycling center/transfer station, but they have to be separated by type, and I don't think they take glass. When you don't have city-provided bins for keeping things separate, it is a total pain in the neck to do so - we've tried. Anyway, so today I finally got fed up waiting for news from the city about this and emailed the public works department. And found that I was wrong. They have no plans to change the system that is in place, and "In order for recycling efforts to be cost-effective and not end up in the landfills, the materials must be sorted." Which is, as Bellevue shows, totally false. Not to mention that Conway's drop-off doesn't make you sort anything except glass. So I guess we will have to continue doing what we have been doing, and taking monthly trips to Conway with our cars full of recycling. I have been unable to properly recycle anything at my own home since I moved away from home in 2001 - in Austin, our apartments never recycled anything, so we had to take everything to a recycling center there too - and I am getting tired of it. I mean, how many other people in Maumelle actually bother to take any recycling to the drop-off center? Probably not that many. I do, but I am close to what my cousin (who is one himself) calls a hippy nut-job (I have two compost bins and a worm bin - definitely hippy nut-job). In this advanced day and age, we should have smaller garbage cans and larger recycling bins, and I should have to sort my recycling. Simple things to save the earth, like recycling, should be getting easier, not harder.

Recycling incentive

Here in NY we have a bottle deposit on certain bottles (caffeinated beverages and beer basically) that means you get charged 5 cents per bottle when you buy the product, which can be redeemed when you take it back. You can also make some money by collecting bottles on the sides of the road (or canal in my case). Some groups, like the cub scouts and the local college rugby team, use this as a fund raiser. I think this is great - I took in a bunch of bottles yesterday and made $4.55. Yes, some of those cents were ones I already spent, but a good proportion was stuff we collected. And yes, that isn't much money, but it certainly feels like money out of nothing - I hardly had to do any work to get it - just pick up bottles that I would probably pick up anyway.

The shame is that bottles of water, sports drinks, and tea are not redeemable. Apparently they were fairly rare when the law was enacted here, but are now sold in epidemic proportions. I think there is a bill going through the State House to get them included. I hope it works. Also, I have read some commentary that the deposit should be raised to 25 cents a bottle to help encourage recycling. I'd be for that - if it included water, it might also help cut down on the amount that people buy. I mean, tap water is basically free, and is usually better tested than bottled water. And it doesn't produce lots of trash.

A small victory

...In our ongoing fight against plastic. We managed to get through our weekly trip to the grocery store without getting a single new plastic bag. For produce, we either didn't put the item in a bag - seriously, why does one lemon or one tomato need to be in a bag anyway? - or used a recycled bag we brought from home. Of course we used our canvas bags for the trip home. By swift action, we managed to avoid both the extra, unnecessary bag around the already well wrapped fish and the one that the pharmacy puts around the bottled prescription. Yay us. Unfortunately, we did end up with yet another small plastic tub (which is unrecyclable in this neck of the woods - we have to send them home to my parents for that) when we bought feta. Too bad we can't bring our own container to the cheese counter and ask them to use it instead. A nice homey, hippy co-op would probably do it, but not Wegman's, I'd wager.

We already get our eggs from the (semi) local co-op/natural food stores, because I can't stand to buy the ones in styrofoam that probably come from chicken concentration camps; now, we might start buying our milk there too. Last week when I dropped in to get eggs, I noticed that the store had milk from one of the other Rochester suburbs. Since we already had enough milk for the week I didn't buy any, but next time I probably will.

All of this maneuvering to get rid of plastic and find good food (and reading Michael Pollan's books and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I have just started) is making me want to become a small scale farmer - not one who sells stuff, just one who can support their own eating habits. Chickens for example. I have never wanted chickens, and always laughed (or rolled my eyes) at my mom when she would bring up her desire for chickens, but now I want my own chickens so I can have my own eggs. And I want a huge garden, with all sorts of vegetables, and an orchard with apples, peaches, plums, cherries, and bananas. OK, maybe not bananas :)

At the moment, all of that is a complete dream, since we are locked into the depths of winter, in a rental house. We are supposed to get several inches of snow in the next couple of days. So much for the garden. I wonder how the cats would like chickens though...

Environmental olio

Olio: A miscellaneous collection of things. It's a crossword puzzle word, and I have never seen it used in any other context. There, you have learned something today!

Thumbs up to Whole Foods for banning plastic bags in all of its stores as of April 22. Shoppers will still be able to get paper bags, or buy a reusable tote. As I think I have said before, we take our own canvas bags every time we go to the store. I am not sure if this ban includes the produce bags - I doubt it - but those can be reused and recycled as well. We also have a set of nifty net bags that we bought years ago that work really well for things like apples, oranges, potatoes, onions, etc. Many places in Europe charge a small fee (several cents) for bags, if you don't bring your own. I hope more stores follow Whole Foods' example.

Thumbs down to the FDA for opening the door to cloned meat in the food supply. So it may be safe for consumption, but that really isn't the point. It won't really benefit the average consumer, and it will definitely affect the diversity of species used as food. The health of a species and ecosystem can be determined by the diversity of species - what will it say if all the animals in one system are essentially all the same animal? For further discussion on this topic, here is a short essay by Verlyn Klinkenborg, and a segment of the radio show Living on Earth (the same show I got the water use link from).

As for our environment here in Western New York, it is still cold, and there is a light dusting of snow. I am hoping for a lot more snow this week, but don't think I am going to get it.

How much do you recycle?

Yesterday was (I think) America recycles day. We recycle about as much as we can - we have a worm bin to recycle food scraps (although we can't recycle all that we create with the bin we have, we do a fair amount), we recycle all our newspapers and other scratch paper, and I have started using the backs of envelopes to write directions and lists on, we recycle all cans and bottles that we can. The biggest problem here in Brockport, as it was in Austin, is what to do with the number 5 plastics. We can't recycle them here, and we can't really avoid them - the yogurt we eat comes in 5 plastic tubs (in Austin, I was able to get yogurt in glass jars, but not here) and cottage cheese, and sour cream too. So, at the moment, we are just holding on to all these containers. In Austin I saved these and sent them to my parents. My mother considers this to be rather eccentric behavior on my part, but my dad agrees with me. I don't want all these containers to go to the landfill, just because the local waste management company can't recycle them...We also try not to buy unnecessary items that we will then have to dispose of at some point, and we try to use everything we have for as long as possible.

Anyway, how much do you recycle? What is your impact on the planet? Here is a nifty little graphic/calculator to find out.