An inconvenient truth of being green

I was an avid re-cyclist, till about two months ago. I would diligently put all that is recyclable in the recycle bins. I recycled plastic and glass bottles, plastic bags, milk and juice containers, soda cans, paper, batteries and even used electronics like cellphones. I did this for almost 4 years. And something happened that altered my behavior.

My previous residence of three years had a huge recycle container and a regular trash collector very nearby. It took care of recycling the bulky items - soda cans, plastic and glass bottles. The paper and electronics were recycled at my wife's workplace which was close by and I delegated them to her. The only item requiring a little extra effort were the thin plastic grocery bags. I took them to a grocery store nearby that had containers for recylcing them. So it worked well for me while I lived there.

About six months ago, I moved to my current location. For all the grandeur of my current rental place, it does not have any recycling containers. The residents are left to device plans for themselves to recycle stuff. The weather was fine and dandy in fall. I found a school nearby that accepted plastic and glass recyclables. The plastic bags were taken to a local grocery store or Wal-Mart. I had to take the paper, like magazines, newspaper, junk mail etc, to my work place as my wives work did not have paper recycle containers at her new job. That was extra task I had to take up on myself but I felt good about do taking the extra step.

Things took a different turn with the onset of winter. I only ventured out if I absolutely had to. Now the recycle project became a hassle. It was causing a lot of inconvenience for a morally right thing to-do with questionable good. I was emitting carbon with my extra miles driving while trying to reduce carbon footprint. I was taking an extra trip to the local school, to the local grocery store or Wal-Mart for recycling. Recycling plastic bags has been the most trouble I had with recycling. Most places including Wal-Mart are highly inconsistent in their plastic bag recycling policies. Some places do and some do not have the containers to leave your plastic bags for recycling. A place that had the recycle receptacles today may not have them the next time you visit them. This inconsistency lead me to take extra trips to multiple places just to recycle plastic bags. I was driving a ton heavy car about 5-10 miles a trip to recycle couple pounds(if at all) of plastic bags.

Similar but a slightly different picture comes into play with the remaining - glass bottles, plastic bottles and aluminium/plastic cans. Since these are bulky and I own a rental place without a backyard, they ended up piling in our small kitchen. Some like milk cartons smell really bad, if you forget to rinse off the remaining contents and thereby got me into trouble at home. My kid started playing with them and managed to open some of these bottles spilling the few drops left inside on the floor. I had to clean the floor and I hate mopping floors. Of course the hazard of my kid drinking the expired contents and putting the lids in her mouth exists. But those are trivial collateral damages for having a high moral ground. Unwanted cleaning of course is an inconvenience I cannot tolerate.

As always, this experience of mine, lead to a larger question. Is recycling worth the effort? Lets break it down.
Plastic bottles - First you have to remove the caps. The caps are usually made of different plastic and most times are not accepted for recycling. If you don't remove the lids, the odds that an employee at the recycling factory would throw the bottle away are very high. It is more work for the average Joe at the factory and he/she is not going to waste his time of separating the lids of every bottle. He is just going to throw the bottle away and it defeats the purpose of recycling. So might as well remove the lids. Then you need to rinse the bottles before recycling because the residue left can contaminate other plastic, thereby preventing your plastic from being fully recycled. You think you are done here. Well not yet; It is highly recommended that you crush the plastic bottles before you recycle for save space in the recycle bins/containers. From NPR, more on plastic recycling - For Empty Water Bottles, There's an Afterlife.

Paper - The paper recycling has it's own problems. The important being your identity. If you accidentally discarded an important document like a credit card bill or a bank statement, you risk identity theft. So you have to separate the sensitive documents from regular ones. The sensitive documents will have to be shredded and the rest could be dumped in recycle bins. Sometimes shredding alone doesn't prevent identity theft. Some smart folks could recover your shredded material and piece them together to gather information about you. So due diligence is required.

I have already listed the issues with thin plastic bags - inconsistent collection facilities.

Electronic Waste - one would think you did a good job by recycling your electronic waste. Most electronic waste recyclers will ship the waste to emerging countries like China, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc where they are valuable metal is extracted out of them. The metals are scavenged by workers with no protective equipment and breathe in high levels of toxic chemicals, which are then released into the atmosphere. Please refer to this link - After Dump, What Happens To Electronic Waste?, for more information. Not only is electronic waste hazardous, it can also cause identity theft if not cleaned up properly before recycling. In certain parts of Africa rogues can purchase unwiped hard drives for $25 - $300. Needless to say these hard-drives can contain a lifetimes worth of data - sensitive and personal.

The bigger issue however is finding a responsible recycler who does due diligence in providing safe environment for the workers and also does the recycling in a responsible manner. Currently it is not very economical for recyclers without heavy support(subsidies/tax incentives etc) from the government. Follow this link from December 2008, when everything on earth was down - Falling Prices Take Toll On Municipal Recycling. In conditions like that the economics of recycling is a not very promising. Dream of every recycling enthusiast is "Zero Waste" and getting to zero waste with recycling is only possible by making going greener more profitable - Beyond Recycling: Getting to 'Zero Waste'.

So, with all the inconveniences of recycling, I am not surprised that most folks don't recycle. Unless these inconveniences are removed, unless it becomes much more easier to recycle, no amount of promotions in the media can help increase interest in recycling among our fellow citizens. Also recycling has got to be profitable for recyclers.

As for me, I will wait out this terrible winter to get back into recycling rigorously. I have the above valid reasons to excuse myself till it is more convenient for me to recycle more.

Giant Scallions, Mini Zinnias and Constant Gardener

After a not so humble beginning to which I had a modest outcome last year, I set out a far more outreaching goals this year. I went nursery style, from seeds with lot more varieties and increased the footage. I was lucky to have a about 50 sq. ft. of land in front of my apartment that I could use for gardening. I will detail later on why this luck resulted in back breaking work for me.

I decided to challenge myself this year. Not only did I wanted to raise the flowers and vegetables from seeds, but I wanted to raise them organic style with minimum or no synthetic materials like pesticides and fertilizers etc. I learnt that it was lot of more harder than it seems and gardening in this part of earth is lot more different than in a tropical country like India.

I bought the seeds for five types of flowers and red bell peppers. The winter was long this time in North East PA. I could not plant these seeds outside until mid May which turned out to be a mistake. I learned that most people who raise plants from seeds begin the process early in April indoors. So by the time the frost ends beginning May, the seedlings grow about two inches and are ready to be transplanted in the garden and blossom in June. But those were for experienced gardeners to know. The minimal gardening knowledge I carried across the ocean watching my Mom do her garden was of little help. Last year, I bought almost ready to blossom plants and hence that experience did not come handy this time other than the fact that I have to be watchful for aphids in pepper plants.

The seeds were either not so good or the timing was late, the germination did not happen for about three weeks and that too a very few came out of the lot. The rest took even longer. I sowed the seeds in the three 24in window trays I bought last year with the intention to transplant the flower plants in the garden in front of our town home.

During this mean time something happened that would be brought the most outcome with very little effort from my side. I bought a bag of onions from Walmart. After a week some of these onions bore green shoots out of them. My mother-in-law not wanting to throw them away, cut the good part of the onions and buried the green shoots in one of the plant trays that did not bore any plants yet at that time. She did similarly plant some carrots and beetroot shoots and nothing came out of them yet.

During the end of May after about 3 weeks some of the seeds sprouted. I transplanted all the flower plants into the ground. The trouble that came out of this endeavour was multiple and involved a lot of work. First of the all there were two inches thick mulch above the soil. I had to clear them before transplanting the plants into the soil. The soil in this area was clay soil, suitable for making pots but not so much for flower plants. To top of it as soon as I planted them, heavy rain poured in that kept the soil soggy for a long time.

I did not cover the mulch over the area around the plants after transplanting. This caused a trough and soil remained wet for a lot of time. As if this was not enough, the plants began to be eaten by weird bugs from the soil. They were small and white in color. A little search revealed them to be slugs. But I gave up the idea of organic gardening after a period of about two weeks and severe damage to most plants. I got a slug killing pesticide and sprayed them on the soil. I was quite late already and the slugs ate up quite a few plants.

I had some more seeds and after the back breaking transplantation process the first time, I sowed these seeds directly in the ground. But rain was incessant. The rain was so heavy that they washed most of the seeds out and what were left were transported to places close to the edge of the walkway. The plants that came of these are about 2 in tall now. I have no hopes of them bearing any flowers anytime soon.

The slug pesticide was very effective in arresting the death of the plant that remained. I also learnt that it is best to use potting soil in combination with compost. I had potting soil leftover from last year and obtained four 20lb bags of compost from a nearby park for free. I replanted almost all the plants I put in the ground, removing the clay soil for about 3 inches deep and replacing with a mix of potting soil and compost. I did this replanting almost every week for about 4 weeks.

Added to these later were cherry and vine tomatoes and green chilies, courtesy my mother-in-law. She dipped some seeds out of cut tomatoes into some indoor pots we have and almost all of them germinated. She did the same with red bell peppers and green chili peppers. The peppers were the most surprising. After a month from sowing them, more than a hundred of the plants came out and I had to transplant all of them into the ground.

But in all of this, the surprise were the onions that were put in the soil nonchalantly. They grew out to be this giant scallions I have never seen before. Some of them were about 3 feet tall. The two synthetics I wanted to avoid, both seemed to be necessary. The tomatoes hat I transplanted to the ground, refused to grow. I bought Nursery Select 20-20-20 Miraclegro fertilizer to speedup the growth and that did the trick.

After two months of waiting the first flower to blossom was a marigold. It was the ugliest flower imaginable. I shouldn't have expected more from the plant that was hardly 3 inch tall. But as time passed the other marigolds grew and are bearing good normal sized flowers now.


















The Zinnias were the most effected by the slugs. The slugs had feast on these plants. Those that survived have a very stunted growth. I have not had time to re-pot (with compost) these plants as I had become busy at home and work. They are bringing out one flower each which are the tiniest flowers I have seen of that variety. I am still waiting for the other kind of plants to bring out flowers. The same is the case with the peppers, tomatoes.

I had also bought about 8 Zucchinis plants to add to my madness. They bore some flowers and they are fast dropping now without turning into Zucchinis. I was told that this is normal and that the first flowers are male flowers and they fall off. I am eagerly waiting for all of them to fully blossom. With some luck and good weather my gardening experiment might be a success making me one constant gardener moving forward.


















The humble flowers of my efforts so far can be viewed here where you can find a lot more pictures of my garden and the 3 ft tall scallions.