EDITOR'S NOTES: Reuse, recycle or pitch

By David Kennard

dkennard@journalscene.com  @davidbkennard

I am drowning in cardboard boxes. It’s a good thing cardboard is a recyclable product here.

I’m also awash in packing peanuts, Styrofoam, and plastic stretch wrap – all of which is unfortunately going right into a landfill.

With our recent move from out West, we packed everything from picture frames to winter coats in packing supplies. (Why did we bring all those coats and snow boots, anyway?)

I’ve got plastic packing tape, plastic bags, plastic bubble wrap, plastic everything that helped keep my snow boots and wool socks safe in the cross country move.

I’ve filled my garbage can – and my neighbor’s garbage can (he’s out of town) – full of non-recyclable plastics, Styrofoam and a bunch of other stuff that makes me feel really guilty about sending to a landfill.

With only limited recycling options locally, I’m not sure what else to do.

Not too long ago, we owned a home in a rural area, where recycling to everyone in the county meant carrying your garbage out to the back of your lot and dumping it on the burn pile.

Everything got burned. Everything. Household garbage, home siding, old furniture, dirty diapers, insulation, construction materials. It all went up in smoke.

Once a month or so we’d send the kids out and let them rake out the glass and metal that didn’t burn. The glass was taken to the local transfer station and eventually the dump. The metal went to a commercial recycler not too far away. I hauled it in the pickup, and the children got to keep whatever cash reward they earned for their help.

As a child growing up in Denver, we had a home with an incinerator in the back yard. Those were the days when people burned their garbage right in town. It was a normal practice until someone figured out that thousands of home incinerators was a major health concern for a metropolitan area.

Laws were passed and people soon stopped burning their garbage.

My father caught onto the recycling craze early on. I’m convinced he was a closet environmentalist – until that is, the solar panels appeared on our house. Dad got us all on board the environmental bandwagon. We used low flow faucets. We had timers and motion detectors on all our lights. We had a trailer in the driveway where all the neighbors could come dump their newspapers, Montgomery Wards catalogs and paper grocery bags.

The money from the recycled newsprint went to the local Boy Scout Troop.

I can still remember as a child selecting the soft drinks I would buy based on their return value. You could take some bottles back to the store and get a nickle back. Five bottles paid the price of a Snickers bar. Snickers and pop, how did I survive childhood?

All that recycling at an early age has stayed with me. Making me feel a little guilty every time I pitch an empty peanut butter jar or milk container into the kitchen garbage can.

There’s not a lot of options, though.

With no commercial recyclers around, most of everything we use up will find its way either into someone’s burn pile or into a landfill – or as I have seen in some areas of the Lowcountry, pitched on the side of the road. If you do this, please stop. That’s just gross.

With our most recent move, we made a point not to buy any new cardboard boxes. Instead we scoured the dumpsters behind shopping malls and big box stores to find and reuse as many boxes as we could find.

The positive side to that plan was that at least we felt good that we could reuse – if not recycle – some of the cardboard. The downside is that I can’t figure out where I put my bedroom lamp, but I’m pretty sure it’s in one of the 12 vacuum cleaner boxes that are stacked in the corner of my new garage.

David Kennard is the executive editor of Summerville Communications, which publishes the Berkeley Independent, Goose Creek Gazette and Summerville Journal Scene. Contact him at dkennard@journalscene.com or 843-873-9424. Follow him on Twitter @davidbkennard.