I walk through a rather affluent area on my way to work. I love to look at the beautiful yards (far preferring ones where I know the tenants/homeowners manage the yards themselves), but I am forever noticing things that make me sad for the environment. Now, I recognize that there is always more I myself can do, but some of the things I see that disappoint me are:
1. This morning I saw a truck dropping bottled water off at a private residence. There are two things that bother me about this. First of all, there's the truck that's delivering this to someone's home - using gas, polluting, etc., all so someone can have bottled water delivered to his/her front door. Secondly, it's bottled water! All that wasted plastic! I hope it at least gets recycled. Tap water and a reusable bottle is so much better.
2. Endless garbage on trash day. What single residence (unless they have 20 kids) needs to produce 8+ huge garbage bags of trash? Weekly! And I can see through those bags - aluminum cans, plastic bottles, corrugated cardboard. It's so easy to recycle here - why don't they do it? Almost everything (and certainly the three I just listed) are all curbside pickup!
3. Yards with signs that say they've recently been treated with chemicals. Give me clover and crab grass any day, or at least go for organic treatments.
4. All the lawn care trucks. Yards aren't that big around here. I should think many of these people can do it themselves. Perhaps even with human-powered mowers (I really need to find out the technical term for those things), although admittedly those don't do the best job when you have lots of crab grass and clover....
There are probably more that I cannot think of right now. And perhaps I need to stop complaining and come up with some solutions - at the minimum, teach my upstairs neighbors (from another country where they perhaps do not recycle?) about recycling.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Environmentally Unfriendly
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5 comments:
1: This post is awesome, and everything in it is spot-on.
2: They're called reel mowers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reel_mower#Reel_.28cylinder.29_mowers
Thanks Reyn! Reel mowers - I will try to remember that. :)
So I'm way late in leaving a comment, but I have two. First, while the truck dropping off the bottled water is no doubt polluting, I would like to mention that most companies reuse the plastic jugs. When the truck stops by with new ones, the consumer leaves the empties to be refilled. Generally they lease a certain number of bottles to keep in a cycle. For locations like yours I personally think it would be better to make people walk to pick up the jugs! :)
Second, I read that coffee grounds are a good natural fertilizer. I have yet to test this myself, but I'm sure I will since I drink a lot of coffee.
Jugs of water are one thing, especially those water cooler ones. I know they get reused. But these were individual sized bottles of water. The kind you buy in bulk at Walmart, Costco, or the like. Not the types of bottles that get used.
I have heard that about coffee grounds as well. Paul's mom recently stuck some in her houseplant containers. I am waiting to hear how those turn out before I try the same myself.
Another good one is egg shells. Read here. I love eggs, so this would be a good idea for me. I really like the idea of using them in the bottom of pots. I'm going to have to try that.
My fault, I misread the post. That is very lame to have individual bottles like that delivered, especially if the recipient is a healthy, mobile adult.
Keep me posted on the success of the coffee grounds! Meanwhile, I'll read up about the egg shells.
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