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  • Recycling–now you can be OCD about it too!

    2010 - 12.22

    Mindfulness– it’s half the battle

    I’d like to take a minute to articulate something my inner monologue spends a lot of time debating.  Recycling.  Today I was walking toward the garbage can with a small piece of plastic in my hand, about to toss it out.  Unfailingly, every time I find myself in this situation, there are two thoughts that go through my mind.  The first one is something along the lines of, “well, this piece of plastic is pretty small.  In the end, how significant is it?  I mean, the trash bag itself is made out of plastic, right?”  And then the second thought kicks in, often in a harsh, reprimanding tone; “man, what the fuck are you thinking?  You know that plastic is going to sit in a landfill for at least 500 years before it even STARTS decomposing.  Is that the legacy you want to leave behind?”

    Some sources say it takes 1,000 years before the decomposition of plastic begins.  There’s tons of other things in our lives that take long timescales to recede into the natural environment as well.  Disposable diapers take 550 years, aluminum cans 200-500 years, cigarette butts probably one to five years, and newspapers just two to four weeks.  Styrofoam, that notorious offender, seems to vary wildly in the estimated lifespans I find online.  Anything from a decade to 5,000 years. (Or more!)

    Yet there are other substances with even longer lives than my dreaded tiny plastic wrapper.  Trying to find an answer for how long glass takes to biodegrade is difficult.  Some people place the number at around a million years.  A million years!  That’s just… stupefying.  Suddenly the pressure is really on to enjoy this bottle of Snapple.  Made from the best stuff on Earth–silica and oxygen.  Sand grains.  How long does it take for a beach to biodegrade?

    I remember back home when I was a child, digging in the backyard and finding plenty of pieces of glass in the dirt.  Our house was built way back in the time when people used to bury their own trash in their backyards.  What a crazy idea that seems like today.  There’s so many ways it wouldn’t work–you’d run out of space in no time flat, you’d be worried about polluting the water table from the esoteric materials commonly used today, and it would just be a lot of work!  All that digging.  You’d need to be making some serious holes to dispose of just your kitchen trash alone.  Think of what you’d be doing differently.

    Of course there’d be a flip side: I don’t know about you, but my house is already cluttered with purposeless knick-knacks, and nostalgic mementos that really are just a waste of space.  At some point, I’ll wade through the junk and in a fit of cleansing say, ugh, just throw all this away.  And thusly some antique glass milk bottle that I had been saving for who knows why ends up in the landfill, sandwiched and smooshed under piles of other people’s stuff.  Maybe with the right items surrounding it, the milk bottle lives for a thousand, thousand years.  It’s a sobering thought.  Epochs away and eons from now, when the legacy of anything I ever did, and everyone I ever knew has been long since forgotten, this milk bottle will probably have outlasted it all, preserved underground for millenia, now an ancient artifact for future archeologists, paleontologists, anthropologists to scrutinize and ponder, now why do you think its owner had thrown this away?

    Here’s a nice handy list of items to be neurotic about throwing away:

    * Aluminum Can  200-500 years
    * Batteries – 100 years
    * Cardboard Box- 4 weeks
    * Cigarette Butt up to 10 years
    * Cotton Rag- 1-5 months
    * Disposable Diapers- 500-600 years
    * Glass Bottle  1 Million years
    * Leather- up to 50 years
    * Lumber- 10-15 years
    * Monofilament Fishing Line- 800 years
    * Milk Cartons (plastic coated) 5 years
    * Nylon Fabric- 30-40 years
    * Orange Peel- 2-5 weeks
    * Paper-2-5 months
    * Plastic Film Container- 20-30 years
    * Painted Wooden Stake- 13 years
    * Plastic 6 pack cover- 450 years
    * Plastic Bag- up to 500 years
    * Plastic Coated Paper- 5 years
    * Plastic Soda Bottles- Forever
    * Rope- 3-14 months
    * Rubber Boot sole- 50-80 years
    * Sanitary Pads- 500-800 years
    * Styrofoam- More than 5,000 years
    * Tin Cans- 50-100 years
    * Wool Clothing- 1-5 years

    source links:
    http://www.greenecoservices.com/how-long-does-it-take-for-trash-to-biodegrade/
    http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4928812_does-plastic-container-start-decomposing.html

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