By the end of our annual Earth Day event in Egremont, we will have diverted as much as 800 pounds of material away from our delicate land and waterways into trash or recycling streams.
Fighting climate change can mean everything from sealing up drafty houses and driving an electric vehicle to keeping up with a fossil-free push that is gaining steam worldwide.
Let’s hope that China’s ban on several types of scrap plastic will push our society to rethink our reliance on plastic and also force us to come up with more options for its post-consumer use.
Check with your town, but most paper and tissue gift wrappings, as well as cards, are recyclable as long as they don’t contain foil, metallic inks or glitter. And all those cardboard shipping boxes could make a great first layer of sheet mulching next spring.
Foraging through garbage and picking through the houses and property of the dead, the rag-and-bone man became a figure for dark shadows and dead ends. So watch out for him on Halloween.
The idea was to collect 5-cent deposit beverage containers from the town transfer station and send the money to victims of a historically destructive month of hurricanes. In the process, we also developed some ideas about how the Massachusetts Bottle Bill, a good thing, could be made even better.
For each type of dumpster, the town pays a hauling fee of between $150 and $250. Reducing the number of trips saves money so we try to cram as much as possible into each load. You can help by crushing that gallon plastic milk container under your foot and squishing out the air.
Not everyone enjoys separating trash, rinsing cans and bottles and loading their cars with plastic film bags for their next trip to town. We get that. And we don’t want to be finger-wagging scolds. We try to build team spirit.
