Recycle After Reading!

I happily pay for someone to come and pick up my trash for me and take it somewhere far away from my house, but paying someone to pick up my recycling makes me one unhappy camper. When I recycle, I separate the glass from the paper and plastics and make sure no food or contaminants are included. I do this because it allows the recycle company to break down and re-use the materials faster, and they require it in their recycling guidelines. The time and effort that is required to recycle is a hassle, and it’s because of this hassle I feel it is wrong to charge individuals to recycle. In fact, I believe garbage companies should rebate their recycling clients because we do most of the work involved in recycling, and the Recycle Company already profits from the materials we provide.

Why do we as recyclers put up with this? It’s the trashy garbage company. Since in most cases the garbage and recycling is taken care of by the same Company, they charge for both, which in a roundabout way forces us to pay to recycle.

You may be asking “why is this important?” According to a Harris poll 1 out of every 4 Americans do not recycle a thing, ever. Of those who do not recycle, 10 percent said they don’t do it because they don’t believe it makes a difference, and 15 percent said it is not available where they live. The other 75 percent had varying reasons, the majority being because of the time, effort, and cost that is involved with recycling. To give those who do not believe recycling makes a difference the benefit of the doubt, I will assume that they are using that as an excuse for laziness; if not, they should from here forward be known as idiots. According to the Oberlin College Recycling Program, recycling one can powers a 100-watt light bulb for 20 hours. You may be saying to yourself, “That’s not that much!” But just to spin that statistic a little bit, Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day. Now consider the 25 percent of American who do not recycle. That would equate to 8.97 billion cans per year. But in all actuality the number of cans land-filled last year was about 39 billion. That amount of tin cans has a scrap value of more than $600 million dollars. At that rate, there is no doubt that we will eventually be mining our own garbage for the resources we have buried. And that’s just cans! That’s not including paper, metal, glass, plastic, Styrofoam, or rubber. Each us citizen uses approximately 1 100-ft Douglas fir tree in paper and wood products each year, and the population of the US is over 300 million. The next time you hear someone say that they don’t think recycling makes a difference, I require you to state these statistics and convince them not to be lazy.

Since some people are obviously not getting the seriousness of this, it again, seems the only other way to influence people to recycle is with money. I’m pretty confident that nearly every person in America would put forth the time and effort and not worry about the money if they found a $10 bill on their front porch every day the recycling was picked up.

Recycling is the only sure way to prevent the world from following in the footsteps of the movie Wall-E. The world as we know it is in a garbage crisis and something must be done. Americans produce 225 million tons of garbage a year, which is enough to spread over 1400 football fields 30 stories high. The movie Wall-E is not only a good movie, but it has the potential to be reality. In the movie, the world’s entire population left Earth to live in space ships because Earth was overrun with garbage and become uninhabitable. There are towers of garbage taller than the skyscrapers and the pollution has killed all trees and plants and oxygen is no longer present. It only takes 750 years for plants to begin to grow again. I would have hoped that the facts alone would convince people to recycle, unfortunately some aren’t getting it, and we must resort to making cartoon movies to brainwash our children to prevent the earth from being uninhabitable.

Recycling companies goals, just like any other business is to make money. If the recycle companies rebated individuals for recycling, it is safe to assume more people would recycle and the companies would make more money, but it is unknown if the company would make as much if they do now. Is it right to cause the recycling companies to lose money if they aren’t causing the problem? Maybe not, but the people who run these recycle companies should take note, if there isn’t a world left, there won’t be recycling, they can’t make money, and they won’t be alive. Please rebate recyclers, our lives depend on it!

“If today is a typical day on planet earth, humans will add fifteen million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, destroy 115 square miles of tropical rainforest, create seventy-two square miles of desert, eliminate between forty to one hundred species, erode seventy-one million tons of topsoil, add twenty-seven hundred tons of CFCs to the stratosphere, and increase their population by 263,000.”

My super sweet, fantastic, ultimate, dream t.v.

I have had an unhealthy obsession with big screen televisions. LCD, LED, DLP, Plasma, it doesn’t matter, if it’s big, I’m in! My friends have some amazing t.v’s and my envy turns for the worse when I have to go home to my not so big screen. My fiancee Alissa, has been well aware of my desire for a larger t.v, and has put up with my begging for a long time. Every time we have the ability to buy a t.v something comes up, birthdays, holidays whatever. We have been planning on waiting to get anything until after our wedding in August, but after getting tax return information, plans can change.

I am happy, well more than happy to report that I am the proud owner of a new 46” panasonic plasma t.v. It is literally super sweet, fantastic, ultimate, and my dream t.v. I do believe my fiancee is going to murder me if she hears me say “doesn’t that look amazing” one more time. I am beyond happy.

Sincerely,

Grinning ear to ear

Mercy Kill, or Hope

I ask myself, if I were in a “persistent vegetative state” would I want to be mercy killed? The first thing I thought of when trying to answer this question was hope. Has anybody ever recovered from being in a “persistent vegetative state?” The answer is yes. Because of this fact I feel that it is wrong to “mercy ill” someone that is in a “persistent vegetative state”. To be clear, I have not been able to find an instance that someone has had a full recovery, but they have recovered to the point of awareness and have been able to function on their own with some supervision.

Next, I wanted to know if there is anyone that can describe it. In the research that I have done, I have found no person that has been able to. The few people that have had what the medical field describes as recovery, has merely made an improvement to the point of being mentally handicapped. You are not completely unawared, but you’re not completely aware either.

Since opening my eyes to “persistent vegetative state” I feel it is a good idea to know what it really means. Thanks to Wikipedia, “A persistent vegetative state is a condition of patients with sever brain damage who were in a coma, but then progressed to a state of wakefulness without detectable awareness.” There  is a medical definition, but it is much less descriptive, vague and doesn’t help.

This subject is very controversial, while there is a lot of information available, the medical world is still in the infant stages of being able to determine without reasonable doubt what exactly it truly means to be in this state. They don’t know if people are aware but lack the function to respond to it, or if truly people aren’t responding because they are unaware.

I have thought long and hard on the subject and I have discussed it with my close family and what I have determined is that nobody wanted to die if there was a chance of recovery, no matter how long it took. I know that it would be hard on my family and friends to see me in a “persistent vegetative state” bedridden, tubes coming and going. I know it would be hard for them to look at me and seem me looking around, but never acknowledging that their there, never making eye contact, speaking or responding to their words, smile or touch. If I could save them the heartache of ever going through that, I would say yes, pull the plug, mercy kill me, do whatever you need to and prevent them from the anguish. But if there was a chance of recovery, no matter how hard the months, or years were, my family could look back and say that the tears and touches and smiles and just their simply being there didn’t go to waste, than hope was all worth it.

My Problem…

Every time I am asked something I stop and tell myself “just don’t roll your eyes, don’t roll your eyes, seriously, don’t roll your eyes.” The next thing I see when I look up is my fiancée looking at me with a scowl and like clockwork off in the distance I hear, “ding, ding, Round 1”.

If you haven’t got the point, I have a problem, I subconsciously roll my eyes at nearly everything I see, feel and hear. You may ask, “why is that a big deal?”, and normally I wouldn’t focus on it too much, but lately, I am doing it at nearly everything I see, feel or hear, my fiancée do. As you can imagine, this does not bode well. I have thought of many solutions to my problem and the two I like the most and am currently working on are the “smiling instead” solution and the “internalize your initial response, and have no reaction” solution. Why not just stop, you ask? I wish it were that easy!

If I can smile instead of roll my eyes, no conflict arises, no hurt feelings are created, an emotion of annoyance and frustration is gone, and we live NOT “to fight another day”. I try to explain that it is not intended, it’s an accident. But no matter what the reason for me rolling my eyes, it effects the one I love, and I need to change for her, no, I need to change for us.

If the opportunity to smile is missed or forgotten my second solution to my problem is my backup because, let’s be honest, doing the laundry doesn’t put a smile on many peoples faces. So if I can’t smile to portray happiness, I need to be deadpan and portray nothing. No reaction is better than rolling my eyes at everything, I have tested this in the field and it works.

Since my methods are still a work in progress, all I can inform is that they are working. Now because I know how hard this is, some advice to those in relationships, never make a sign of irritation such as rolling of the eyes a default knee jerk response. I created this long ago and it is unbelievably hard to break. Wish me luck!

Recycle This!

I think recycling should be free because the only thing stopping more from doing it is money, time, and effort.

First let’s take a look at the opposite of recycling, garbage is its name. It makes sense to charge money to pick up peoples trash. Somebody produces trash and they pay some company to remove it and take it to a designated place, the dump.

Recycling on the other hand is like doing someone a favor. You sort the mess you have created so a company can pick it up organized, in order for them to easily break it down and produce new products. Why are we charged? I know they have to come get it, but shouldn’t they be happy to do so since that is how they get the materials to make new products?

Company x plans on building something and they need materials, so Company x pays money for materials to build product. The way recycling works, company x plans on building something, company x charges money to receive materials to build product. Very much backwards!

In the grand scheme of things we the recyclers should be paid. I’m pretty confident that nearly everyone would put forth the time and effort, if there was a ten dollar bill on their doorstep every Friday morning.