It’s Second Nature, Isn’t It?

There was a guest from back east staying here at the house a few weeks ago. She was a wonderful person who made good conversation and good food, and she brought a week’s worth of good warm January weather with her. Not that it was good for the state of the drought, but it did feel nice.

As we went about our days, I would notice from time to time things where they shouldn’t be. Empty toilet paper rolls in the waste basket, used paper towels in the kitchen garbage bin, scraps of food in the garbage. I quietly picked these out of the garbage and put them into the recycling or compost bins where they belonged. Not saying anything, and not making a big deal out of it.

But she noticed. She asked why I was pulling stuff out of the garbage and setting it aside. When I explained how the system worked within the house, and the city, she surprised me by saying how it just must be second nature to us by now. But for her it was an awkward experience.

I forget that there are whole communities across the country that do not have recycling or composting programs. I forget that there are many people who have to make the choice to make the big effort of recycling by saving things up and taking them to a recycling point themselves, or not recycle at all.

As I’m writing this, I’m googling ‘how to start a recycling program in your community’ and not finding any search results. No ideas or white papers on how to approach the City Council, or Waste Management. No advice from communities who have already set up their programs. No numbers crunched, no metric tons or social benefits to the community reported. I did find a lot of articles on how to set up bins and get the word out within an office or a school or in your own home. But nothing about starting a program from scratch.

So, step one would be to get the word out in the community that recycling and composting might be a good idea.

Step two would be to get all of those people within the community who are interested in setting up a program to contact the Waste Management company in your area. This way WM begins to see that there is interest in the community. Some communities separate their recyclables and compost within the residence, other communities hire people to work at WM to separate items as they come into WM, and I think most use a combination of the two.

If your community is already collecting and composting yard waste (grass clippings, leaves, etc.), it is a no brainer to include kitchen compost in that bin.

And step three would be to go to City Council to mandate a recycling and composting program which would include organizing not only the bins, but also community safety.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area each community has their system set up a little differently. It’s a flexible thing. But more importantly it’s putting materials back into circulation that would not be doing the planet any good by sitting in a landfill.

So if you have some advice on starting a large scale community recycling and or composting program, please leave a comment, and a link if the info is online!