This Saturday, a handful of local concerns are assembling in an Asheville parking lot to collect so-called hard-to-recycle items from area residents. The stated goal of the event is to gather items that would normally wind up in the landfill and divert them to other uses. As the organizer, Rainbow Recycling, explained to the Asheville Citizen-Times: “It’s a convenient one-stop kind of thing where people can donate instead of going to a bunch of different places.”
This event will last four hours. There are five collection events every year, held in various locations around the county. Sounds good, yes?
Hold your applause. When you look past the daisies and sunflowers, the fact that such events are needed at all shows that there is both a deficiency and an inconsistency in how this community handles recycling. When we lived in upstate New York, there were two days a year when customers could put unusual items and hazardous waste like paint cans and batteries at curbside for collection. But these Asheville recycling events make you haul your items on a particular day during a small window of time to a specific location, and if you miss the event in your area, your only alternative is to drive to the county landfill, 14 miles and 23 minutes from the center of town. The 28-mile roundtrip to the landfill wastes at least a gallon of gas and the better part of an hour of time for any person who cares to be environmentally responsible. (I know — I made this trip several times.)
But time and energy are not the only things wasted in this scheme. If you want to recycle your old television, you must pay a $6 fee to have them take it off your hands. If you need to dispose of used fluorescent bulbs, you must either drive to the landfill or to one of the local fire stations that accepts them (and not all of them do). When you put restrictions on what people may discard and you erect barriers like time, money and inconvenience, what you encourage is not safe disposal and recycling but careless dumping and junk hoarding.
Recycling and disposal of items of all types should be made as easy as possible for consumers and businesses. This should be a centralized function of city and county government, not some informal grassroots program. Frequent curbside collection should be provided for city and suburban residents and 24-hour drop-off containers should be installed at convenient locations throughout the county for rural homeowners. If more funds are needed for recycling and disposal of difficult or hazardous items, then it should be paid for either by property taxes or by local excise taxes charged upfront when such items are purchased.
It does no public or private good to have homeowners maintain a store of hard-to-recycle and hazardous materials in their own residences. It only serves to tempt homeowners to irresponsibly dispose of such items in everyday trash (or worse, in their backyards). If this community takes a more holistic view of how waste is stored, handled and transported, it will see that it costs less overall to have routine curbside collection of all hard-to-recycle, hard-to-dispose items. Being responsible should not be a special event.
We respond to photos of food uncritically, as if we had prepared it ourselves — it never occurs to us that the dish might be too salty or too bland, or that the beef is rancid or the shellfish undercooked, or that the dish contains hazardous levels of aluminum or arsenic or kalamata olives. No, it all looks delicious. Photos can’t lie. So sit down and eat up.