Skip to main content

The Hard Choices



I got inspired this morning by a short video from The Good Stuff about a young fashion designer in New York who makes clothing made entirely from fabric scraps that would have gone in the trash. You can see it here .

In the video he also talks about trying to live a zero-waste lifestyle. That made me squirm a little bit. I have recently been struggling with the fact that all the things I wish were recyclable aren’t really recyclable. I guess that’s why they call it “wishcycling”. It challenges my longtime practice of justifying purchases because I can just “recycle the packaging.”

Clamshell containers with precut fruit or bakery items or deli sandwiches? Nope. I have come face to face with the reality that if I choose that level of convenience, then I have to put that clamshell into the trash, headed to a landfill. Ugh...

When my younger daughter was a baby, I exhorted the rest of the family with this mental picture:

No you don’t have to recycle that. Just put it in a bag and toss it in the baby’s room, because she’ll end up having to deal with it eventually.

 No, I wasn’t playing fair. And yes, I did gain some traction with that line of thinking, although I probably changed more behavior simply by persisting in the behavior of recycling, week after week. The fashion designer puts it like this:

Living a zero waste lifestyle isn’t a religion. It’s a practice.

 You have to work at it every day. Some days are better than others. But you keep at it.

Rather like blogging, I suppose.

I just read that aluminum pie pans and aluminum take-out containers are no longer recyclable locally. This is breaking my brain a little. How is this even possible? I have a stack of rinsed pans from Halal Guys by the kitchen sink. They appear to be staging a sit-in.

It occurs to me that I can wash them and set them aside for the holidays, make new decorative lids, and use them for the cookie and candy gifts I make this year. It’s a start.

We have multiple opportunities for recycling in Howard County but the truth is that recycling doesn’t come close to touching the enormous amount of waste that we generate every day. Making different choices requires changing our day to day lives and changing how we think.

That’s far more difficult.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...
2 comments
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more