farmdoc's blog post number 573

As I write these words, I’m in Melbourne. Not only am I away from my own computer that I left at home in Mole Creek, but I feel like I’m on holiday. Which I am, in a sense, because I’m not doing my farm chores and my medical work. So please forgive me if I don’t do my usual Saturday compendium post for you today. Speaking of this week, 9-15 November is National Recycling Week. What I wrote about its 2008 incarnation still applies. I recycle. And I feel ambivalent about it. On one hand it’s better to recycle than to add to landfill. (Each of the half million Tasmanians adds to landfill by an average of a tonne annually. Someone must be adding much more because I add much less.) On the other hand I’d rather not recycle at all – because I’d rather buy items sans packaging, or with biodegradable packaging e.g. paper. But Western societies aren’t geared up for this, to my chagrin. Maybe it’ll happen one day, but by then it’ll be too late. Speaking of happening, I’m not even sure that the items I leave in the bins at my local tip – sorry, waste transfer station [WTS] – are recycled, even if they’re taken away by trucks owned by recycling companies. And speaking of bins, I don’t know if any WTSs have bins marked with the numbers inside the triangles on recyclable items. But mine doesn’t. I wish it did. Ho hum.

P.S. Normal compendium programming will resume on Farmdoc’s Blog next Saturday.

farmdoc's blog post number 208

I do it. I’ve done it for years. Recycling, that is. A big wooden box I made sits in the pantry, and all the recycling goes in to it: paper, metal, plastic, glass. Every 2-3 months, when the box gets full, I take its contents to the tip – sorry, waste transfer station – where I decant each item into the appropriate bin. No doubt doing all this makes me feel virtuous. But I don’t know how much actually gets recycled. And hypothetically if all of it was recycled, it’d be only scratching the surface of our planet’s massive environmental problems. All of which is, for me, the backdrop to National Recycling Week which runs from last Monday to next Sunday. Judging from the website, it’s full of activities and educational opportunities, all coming to us care of commercial interests which profit from recycling. Thomas L Friedman, in Hot, Flat, and Crowded, labels events such as National Recycling Week, Walk Against Warming, and Earth Hour, as environmental parties – whereas what is really needed, what is essential and critical and vital, he says, is an environmental revolution. As I wrote yesterday, this overdue and inevitable revolution is the responsibility of governments. In the meantime, the parties are okay as long as they’re seen for what they are. Will I continue recycling? Yes. I’m too obsessive not to.