Help Keep Virginia Beautiful Recycle?
Do you have plans this weekend? In case you missed the news, we’ll be busy tomorrow with America Recycles Day, distributing new recycling bins in three of our State Parks. It’s part of a broader program to install new recycling bins in all of our Parks. But our work won’t be done.
It would be great to continue our efforts through the weekend. While many are jumping in and taking the pledge with Keep America Beautiful to recycle on the 15th, many of the members of Keep Virginia Beautiful are having events that go on all weekend. And the impact that you could have is staggering.
The United States recycles about 31.5% of its trash. Sounds good, but then you compare it to the 46% recycled by the Netherlands or the 52% recycled by Sweden. And neither of those countries started with those numbers. Wales, not that big of a place to begin with, decided to try to make an impact on the amount of trash that they had to ship overseas to landfills. They made a goal of becoming a “zero-waste” society. IN 2010 they had driven their rate of recycling to 42%. Pretty good, right? In the course of a year they pushed that to 48%. In the United States that would be an increase of over 3.5 million pounds of recycled material.
And those numbers begin to add up.
A ton of paper recycled saves the energy of 165 gallons of gasoline. It takes energy to run a paper mill and cut down trees. Sure, recycling uses up energy, but less so than starting from scratch, and we get to keep some of the trees that help to Keep Virginia Beautiful.
Materials from yards and farms are being recovered at a rate of about 60% for composting, and 29 million tons of waste are converted each year for generating energy. If you play it right, you almost create a wonderfully sustainable perpetual motion machine.
We used to just do it. We set milk bottles out for the milkman, and took soda bottles back to the grocer when we bought new ones. Kitchen waste went into the backyard garden and fed the chickens. Those who lived through the 
Depression learned the value of reduce/reuse/recycle because if it wasn’t already in the house you didn’t get it. It wasn’t until 1972 that America saw its first commercial recycling plant in Pennsylvania. It was just a few years later that Woodbuy, New Jersey became the first city in our country that actually required recycling. And while we’ve progressed a great deal over the last forty years, we still haven’t made it normal.
Now, a number of states have passed a “bottle bill.” This is a law that requires that all bottles be returnable for a monetary deposit. They are currently used in almost a dozen states, with the first such bill passed by Oregon in 1972. Makes sense, right? Just like the good old days? Well, a number of organizations have lobbied to fight these bills as causing an undue inconvenience on people. Makes sense, right? You do, after all, have to take the bottles in to receive your money. Like a security deposit. The forces joined to fight these bills have been the beverage container industry and the folks who make bottled drinks. Easier for them to just grab new bottles.
But the benefits are farther reaching. In the mid 1990’s we threw away almost 800 million used tires. Just left them to rot in a landfill. That number is now down to about 270 million, with many of those used tires being used for fuel, sneakers, and cushiony mulch for playgrounds and athletic fields. And in the case of mulch we again Keep Virginia Beautiful by saving a tree.
But here’s the bigger picture: Much like Keep Virginia Beautiful started sixty years ago with one guy noticing roadside litter and organizing his peers to help him make a dent in the problem, raising our rate of recycling is about more than companies and laws. It’s about each of us taking something to the curb. It’s about someone deciding to start composting. It’s about looking for the recycling logo when we buy products for our homes.
This America Recycles Day, be that person.