Until I learned about a facility in the northwest suburbs that will recycle all plastics labeled 1-6. You have to drop them off yourself, and it's around 20 miles from our house, but I was glad to find a way to recycle all those yogurt containers, so I wasn't about to let distance deter me. I began collecting all my plastics 1-6, saving them up until there was a load worthy of driving out to Coon Rapids for the drop-off. (I know, I should want to go there just to be able to say I've been to a place called *Coon* *Rapids*, but it has failed to lure me out there thus far.)
My plastic amassing began in mid-June 2008, and I succeeded in collecting the following pile of plastic waste over the next 12 months.
And here I am with that plastic, to lend a sense of proportion.
It isn't actually that much, come to think of it, but it is striking to see gathered all in one place the amount of plastic waste we produced in a year. An average household probably produces much more than this, and if the municipal recycling program doesn't collect it, it goes straight into a landfill. Here in America if trash is out of sight, it's out of mind.
In Ghana, we were confronted with our waste and the problem of how to manage it every single day. We had our own mini-landfill right next to the house where we burned our trash regularly to prevent local kids from digging through it for discarded treasures. The sight of that waste, day in and day out, prompted us to start composting so we wouldn't have to burn so much in our trash pit. Now that we have a back yard in America, we've started a compost bin here for the same reasons, even if we don't get to see in-person the land our trash fills in each week.
The point is, when I look at that pile of plastic waste I produced over the span of one year, I think about how much waste I've produced in all of my 33 years, and will go on producing for however many more years I'm around. Imagine that pile times 81, the average life expectancy of a white American woman. Is that the legacy I want to leave behind me when I'm gone? Not so much. With that thought in mind, why wouldn't I do whatever I can to reduce, reuse and recycle the resources I consume?
The good news is I didn't have to drive the 20+ miles out to Daniel Boone Rapids in order to recycle my plastic after all. Halfway through my year of amassing, I learned that one of the Co-ops in Minneapolis had a plastic recycling program. In mid-June 2009, I rounded up my various bags of plastics, sorted them by number, and drove them just 7 miles over to the East Side Co-op. On Thursday evenings and Saturdays they'll take in your plastics numbered 1, 2, 4, 5, or 6 (no 3 or 7 at the moment). It's quite easy, really, and I don't have to save up my waste for a year in order to have a quantity worth driving out to the suburbs. I can just pop over whenever I have a bagful of latte tops and cottage cheese tubs, and it gives me a great excuse to explore the Northeast neighborhood.
Maybe your town already collects all recyclable plastics on your regularly scheduled collection day, and I salute your town. Mine doesn't, so I needed a way to recycle what falls outside the municipal box. It's a good thing to do for the common good, and this way the pile of plastic waste I leave behind me will be that much smaller.
