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| Litter! Don't be a slob! |
Still, they had the right idea. When you buy a beverage in Michigan you pay a 10-cent deposit and when you return the container for recycling you get your money back. That’s not exactly a new concept. A few years back that’s the way we bought beverages. We paid a deposit on the glass bottle and brought the empties back to the store and either got our deposit back or traded for the deposit on the next set of bottles. Kids looking to pick up some spare change could usually find it by picking up bottles.
Michigan gets a 90 percent return on cans and bottles. The rest of the country? The national average for aluminum cans runs around 50 percent and just 25 percent for plastic bottles. Aluminum can recycling peaked at 68 percent in 1992. So, what happens to those containers that don’t get recycled? Much of it ends up in our landfills where it lasts virtually forever.
The rest, sad to say, ends up as litter. A friend commented that her father takes a daily six-pack walk, meaning that he doesn’t come home until he’s collected at least half a dozen aluminum cans. I do sort of the same thing, as every time my dog and I take a walk I pick up aluminum cans, and the numbers of cans scattered on city streets is mind-boggling. From the middle of February to the middle of April I accumulated 31 pounds of aluminum, and that’s a big pile of aluminum. On the bright side, at the current price of 60 cents per pound, I got a nice payback for healthful exercise.
The trouble is, the cans I pick up in my neighborhood are trivial compared to the actual problem. A rural Butte resident called to suggest I write about the litter problem. “The roadsides around here are just covered with aluminum cans,” she said, adding that she frequently makes rounds to pick them up but when snow melts in the spring there’s a fresh crop of aluminum.
I told her I fully agree about the littering problem here in our area and that I’d written about it before. I agreed with her suggestion that I write another column about it, though I suspect litterbugs don’t know how to read.
Unfortunately, many of those litterbugs are juveniles illegally drinking beer and they’re chucking those cans out to get rid of the evidence. That’s one excuse. The truth, however, is that litterbugs are nothing but a bunch of slobs.
When I go for walks I often walk across an I-90 overpass and look down on the highway ditch and median and there are aluminum cans everywhere. Bless their hearts; some ‘adopt a highway’ group may pick them up, but that aluminum usually ends up in the landfill.
When I go fishing I walk along the river and find cans everywhere. A pet peeve is people who carefully pick up their cans and dump them in a fire ring. Maybe they think they’re being virtuous that way by not scattering litter. Sorry, you’re still a slob.
In the fall when I’m out hunting in the mountains or the prairies I often find aluminum cans out in the middle of nowhere. For heaven’s sakes, if you can carry a full can with 12 ounces of beverage in your daypack, why can’t you carry back an empty can that weighs next to nothing?
If you’re one of those slobs out joyriding, why not swing by one of the many recycling bins that are placed around Butte and put your cans there?
The late Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo once lamented, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
We have also met the solution, and it is us. Don’t be a slob.
