The Waste We Leave Behind
Talk about leaving behind litter!
Snowstorm Jonas has left us tons to recycle. Mother Earth will do much of the job, melting the snow and filtering it into groundwater aquifers. Where the piles rise into mountains — as in RFK Stadium where D.C. snow is dumped — a tractor-trailer-sized melter hired from Indiana is speeding up the return of snow to water, which will then be treated before entering the stormwater sewer system that eventually leads to the Bay.
However all this snow melts, much of it is Chesapeake bound, sped along by our rooftops, driveways, sidewalks and roads.
Of course Jonas will stick us with the bill.
Stormwater is a recycling issue for which we’d rather not be held accountable.
On other recycling fronts, we’re much more responsible.
At household recycling, many of us are champions. Throughout Anne Arundel County, yellow 65-gallon cans line our roadsides on recycling day. Second nature as that recycling seems now, it didn’t happen by accident. Anne Arundel County has waged a two-decades-long campaign to achieve 44 percent recycling. We’ve had lots of help in learning our lesson: tutoring, free ever-larger recycling containers, curbside pickup.
Yet there’s a backside to that success story. Over half of Anne Arundel household waste ends up as trash, no matter how easy it’s been made for us to avoid that sad ending for the discards of our purchases.
Old habits are hard to change, and new ones even harder to form.
Retraining ourselves to restrain our carryout lunch waste is the challenge we take on in this week’s feature story, Lunch to Go.
The story was born in our own habits. On most any given day, two or three people in the Bay Weekly office order carryout — with all its packaging.
Perhaps you find yourself in the same boat?
Reducing our carryout waste, Knotts writes, begins with a pledge to make lunch greener, starting with small steps.
As an office, we’re creating our own habit-changing support system. Our waste inventory was Step 1, this story Step 2 in building self-awareness of our habits. Next comes stepping up to a commitment to reduce our waste.
We have Fiesta Ware dishes and our own flatware. So we’re reminding ourselves and one another to tell restaurants to skip the utensils. We’ll be asking restaurants that use polystyrene to make the switch, and we’ll avoid them if they won’t. We’re handing out this article to managers when we pick up carryout.
We’re also asking what each of us can do personally, based on our own habits. Some pledge to carry personal to-go kits, so we can package our own leftovers when we eat out.
Kathy’s seen the video of a sea turtle having a straw forcibly removed from its nostril. So she pledges to buy and use a glass or metal straw instead of grabbing the hard-to-identify plastic straws at restaurants. (There are plenty of places to buy reusable lunch ware; her favorite is reuseit.com.)
What can you do to green your lunch? How far are you willing to go? Write [email protected] or visit the Bay Weekly Facebook page.
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]