Reduce, Reuse, Rehash

At the end of the last school year, I bemoaned how my colleagues were antagonistic to my recycling efforts. Their responses were near farcical. Afterwards, I resolved to return to school with a course of action, in part to spite these coworkers. Spite is a legitimate motivation for saving the earth, right?

In a school, paper waste is atrocious. Between announcements, assignments, worksheets, note taking, and scratch paper, with about 2,500 students in the school, I think 10,000 sheets of paper would be a conservative estimate for the amount of paper used in a single day. While some of it is kept for the short term, all of it is disposed of in the long term, adding up to nearly two million sheets winding up in landfills.

When this past school year began, I appealed to the administration to start some recycling program, even offering to head it up. I was told that the idea of recycling had been explored, but was neither affordable or feasible. Soon after, I approached another authority figure and was assured that plans were underway. A couple of months later, this manifested in bins to recycle cans and bottles. When I inquired why the program excluded paper, I learned that the reason for doing bottles was as an added source of revenue and paper would be "too much of a hassle."

The more I've dealt with society at large, the more I realize how inherently selfish people are. Recycle? What's in it for me? Maybe we need to monetarily reward our thoughtless citizens for global preservation of all sorts. This reason is why I'm hardly perturbed by the elevating gas prices. We're not about to coax people to be wiser with their fuel usage without it hurting them financially first.

Though I care about these issues, I would hesitate to call myself an environmentalist. There is so much more that I am aware of that I don't address. I could research companies for their sustainability practices and policies to make better informed purchases. I could become a vegetarian, or failing that, at least cut down on red meat in order to make better use of our natural resources. I could utilize public transportation more often or purchase a vehicle that uses alternative energy sources. Lest my rant come across as preachy, let me be the first to admit that I am hardly the environmentalist I know I could be. I look at my contributions to the earth as being minimal at best. When people can't be moved to make the slightest of sacrifices, however, then we have a problem.

As I mentioned a year ago, we have a problem when we teach our subsequent generations that caring for our environment doesn't matter. In my classroom, I leave a recycling bin directly next to the trash can, and fifty percent of the paper waste still winds up in the trash can. These are the same kids who don't believe in global warming. I used to think that people who actually denied its existence were more mythical than the global warming they disputed, but now that I've experienced them in the flesh, I'm frightened. It's "liberal propoganda (sic)" as one student explained, though ey couldn't define what either of those words meant when pressed.

Anyway, despite the lack of support, I continued my usual practice of bringing my recyclables home all year, but at the end of the year, the amount I have is tenfold. Again, my coworkers saw me hauling multiple armloads of paper products, and again they couldn't help but judge. One colleague responded in a truly condescending fashion, "That's so cute!" "Isn't that more trouble than it's worth?" asked another, clearly not willing to give effort to a similar task. Later, a third person quipped, "If I had known you were one of those people, I would have given you all of mine." One of those people? A recycler? Said with disdain? Furthermore, caring just enough to pass the buck rather than taking responsibility is not actually caring at all.

On one trip, I carried a box-load of paper to my car. Several feet away from vehicle, the bottom of the box busted open and spilled out all of its contents, literally thousands of sheets of paper. It was gusty outside, so before I even had a chance to bend over, the papers blew away. I managed to grab a couple of fistfuls, but other than that they flew quite a distance, onto the sports fields and out of the school boundaries. This is a hellish situation because those papers are a combination of my students' graded assignments, assignments I never quite got around to grading, my personal documents, and even some confidential documents. Most of them successfully escaped, but I got some assistance from the coworker who asked "Isn't that more trouble than it's worth?" to chase down the sheets that didn't get too far. When this person had an armload, ey asked, "Is it okay if I just throw these out now?" Dejected, I sighed, "Sure." In an effort to recycle, I wound up littering instead.

Wouldn't you know it? Not only are my coworkers hindering my pursuit to save the environment, the environment itself is providing me obstacles. I swear, if I face any more resistance, I'm going to take it as a sign to quit. Excuse me while I go burn some plastic.