Green Year

So we spent weeks and weeks going around, trying to decide which was the higher value: organize larger scale recycling in BRC, or preserve our tendency not to do things for people.

Doing it would have been easy-ish–call Waste Management, and for $495 they’d bring and drop one of those monster 30 yard ( cubic ) sorting bins, with all the slots for green glass and so forth. Interesting tidbit–those bins can’t actually be filled with glass, cause they’ll become to heavy to lift and will cleave open like a tanker on an iceberg.  But then we would have started down the deep dark path of not having people take care of their own shit, which is in part one of the fascinating, wonderful things about Black Rock City–we have no trash cans, so we have no trash. Kind of like London when they pulled them all so the IRA would quit stuffing semtex into trash bins, only without the crisp wrappers and cigs littering the streets.

So we decided not to, and then something interesting happened. You may know that each year our External Relations Team takes different public officials on tours of BRC–congressional staff, city council types, that sort of thing. Last year for reasons I can’t recall we extended invites to area managers for Albertsons in Reno. We had a nice took, they took photos, and that was it.

dramatic pause…

Or was it? Seems almost simultaneously with our deciding NOT to provide recycling bins ( lamentable, since virtually every dropoff point in Reno is closed on Labor Day ) those same area managers contacted someone in the Reno BM community, and offered to put recycling dumpsters on their lots, at their own expense, and then print thousands of little hang tags the greeters could hang out, showing where exactly to get to those drop off points on their way home. How cool is that? Very.  They came, they got it, they went home, they thought “hmm, how can we contribute?”, and this is what they came up with. At the same fracking time as we were thinking about it. Neat.O.

Our lesson? Don’t do it for em, and it’ll get done anyway, and in a way that creates community, instead of just outsourcing the problem solving. Little things, but they add up, ya know? We might just be on to something here..

Quick thought, while looking at the copious, delightfully packaged goods set out for guests at your average posh hotel ( all conveniently branded with the logo of their in house spa):

If you use anything-shampoo, conditioner, soap, whatevs, take it home when you leave. It’ll offset your need to buy more just a little bit longer, and the odds are much higher you’ll recycle the packaging when you’re done. Otherwise, the housekeeping staff, on stiff orders to present each guest with a pristine set of their own, will chuck anything that’s been opened, even if the seal was just broken.

And please tell me you’re not leaving the towel on the floor so they’ll replace it. You do? Shame on you–at home you prolly use towels a half dozen times between washes, you can do the same here.

Snipped from comments from SFist this morning.

From reusablebags.com/facts.php?id=7 we see that:

Energy to produce: Plastic 594 BTUs, 2511 BTUs. Besides the obvious global warming issues, this means that making paper bags spews more crap into our air an rivers killing animals and humans alike (just not in a way you can take a picture of like with an animal choking on a bag.

Paper sacks generate 70% more air and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags. Not even close, paper sucks here. Think of all the animals that die in rivers from waterborne pollutants from people choosing paper.

Energy to recycle 1 bag: Plastic, 17 BTUs, Paper 1444 BTUs. There’s many secondary effects here — all the energy to heat up a paper bag vat of chemical goo for recycling causes power plants to spew more crap into the air, release carbon, etc.

Current research demonstrates that paper in today’s landfills does not degrade or break down at a substantially faster rate than plastic does.

It’s not even close. If you have to use a nonreusable bag, choose plastic and then try to recycle it at Safeway when you’re done. Even if you don’t recycle plastic is the clear winner.