_ Is Phillip Miller of Los Angeles what’s wrong with this country? He’s the fellow quoted in this NYTimes article saying he’s stocking up on 100-watt incandescent light bulbs before the onset of federal lightbulb efficiency mandates January 1. For fear he’d not bought enough, he was heading to Home Depot to buy some more when the Times’ reporter cornered him. Is it fair to say that Mr. Miller is putting his own selfish interests before the health of the planet we all share? It’s certainly unfair to single him out for doing so when our elected officials so sympathized with him that they postponed the ban until October and are vowing to repeal it altogether in forward thinking states like Texas. But let’s stick with Miller for a moment.

_ He says the federal legislation forcing him and the rest of the country to buy energy efficient lightbulbs, is “another invasion of personal liberty by our government.” Let’s ask Mr. Miller, if we can, this question: Is it also an invasion of personal liberty to deny NBN the right to build a factory hog farm in the middle on New York’s Levitown? OK, that’s a little extreme. Let’s try something a little simpler, and a little closer to Mr. Miller’s home. Is there any reason why an L.A. resident should be forced to replace the rings in a 1976 Plymouth Duster that’s burning roughly 1 quart of oil every two days? Mr. Miller might say there is, given that his city is suffering under some of the worst smog in the country. By extension, why shouldn’t the general public be compelled to reduce smog everywhere in the country by reducing energy demands on power plants a thousand times dirtier than the piece-o-crap (Rated-R) Duster? Mr Miller, why is buying efficient lightbulbs an invasion of personal liberty when keeping your car running cleanly isn’t? Is it because one affects you directly and the other doesn’t? In deference to Mr. Miller, we’re putting words in his mouth. He may love smog and defend to his dying breath the right of every American to emit as much as they want.

_Assuming otherwise, why is it that so many folks in this country feel laws forcing conservation are an invasion of personal liberty? This is not Miller’s fault or the dirty Duster driver’s fault. It’s a fault of leadership. No one dares mention the prospect these days that we don’t have a right to burn as much fuel as we want. We don’t have a right to throw out as much trash as we want. We don’t have a right to catch fish in ecologically devastating ways. We’re not saying that Miller should go to jail, or that he shouldn’t be allowed to use wasteful lightbulbs, drive a smoky car or build a hog farm in the middle of Levitown, Long Island. All we’re saying is that we should all be forced to pay for the damage we exact on the planet through our indulgences, in order that that damage can be fixed. If Mr. Miller wants a brighter light from his living room lamp while he’s reading the New York Times, he should have to pay more than the gal buying an efficient bulb and sitting a little closer to it to do same. And Mr. Miller, for your information, New England just experienced it’s warmest fall ever and as of this writing it’s 58 degrees outside the offices of NBN. That’s 26 degrees above average on the first day of winter, 144 miles from the Canadian border. Mr. Miller, you might well be what’s wrong with this country, but you’re certainly not alone.

_Who among you think it’s absurd, almost embarrassing, that the entire country is screaming about the lack of jobs and money therefrom while throwing out 4.5 pounds of garbage per person per day? Raise your hands. Not many hands are going up right now because few people think a used Starbucks papercup is anything but trash. But if you rinsed it out carefully that cup would probably work for another dozen or so trips to the lips before giving up the ghost. For that matter, did anyone know that the annoying little cups take-out restaurants use for sauces and salad dressings clean up like new and can be reused for the same purposes in brown bag lunches? Few people outside Ed Begley Jr. and NBN know recycling can be so rewarding because our culture has instilled in us that it’s better to work 60-hours a week to buy stuff and throw it out than it is to not make the money and conserve. For most of us recycling is a pain. When you look at it from more extreme perspectives it’s un-American. Today we want to look at it from the trash picker’s perspective.

_While it may be beneath Americans to pick through their garbage, folks in other countries are more than happy to get a little dirty mining what we pay no mind. The real beauty of trash picking in other countries is it’s largely left to private enterprise. NBN found this study (you have to check out the charts in it) which provided this amazing excerpt: “More than 80,000 people and their families are responsible for recycling about three million tons per year of waste in the six study cities. Due to the recycling efforts of the waste pickers, these cities do not have to spend as much on waste collection and disposal: realizing a combined costs savings of around 38.2 million Euros per year.” That means those 80,000 trash pickers are saving their governments some $650 each per year while earning money to feed their families. The real beauty of this is they are cleaning up the planet at the same time. Where are the six cities? Egypt, Romania, The Philippines, Peru, Zambia and India, not countries famed for their progressive policies.

_The point is a trash picker doesn’t have to be some Somalian six-year-old wading through mountains of toxic and septic waste hoping to mine enough discarded tin to trade for a falafel. In the U.S. that trash picker, they are called Zabaleen, could retire in Somalia after just a few weeks rummaging through the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.  We might be exaggerating, but not by much. The U.S. trash stream, by Third World standards has got to be a gold mine. Why should it be viewed any different in this country? It’s possible that part of that answer, as we discuss in Recycling News this week, is that powerful interests don’t want to see robust recycling programs put into place because those interests make more money in their absence. The more we clean and segregate our trash the more valuable it becomes. Outside of vanity, what’s to stop every American from becoming a trash picker in our own homes: meticulously separating, cleaning and storing the trash we create until enough piles up that we can turn those little sauce and salad dressing cups into a recycling center for cash?

_What’s stopping us is infrastructure. There’s no place to turn those little plastic salad cups in. Most recycling centers are miles from anywhere anybody in this country wants to live Still, if we did purify our trash before putting it out for collection it might be interesting to see what happens. Might entrepreneurial U.S. Zabaleen start collecting the stuff and find ways to cash it in before the garbage men haul it off to who knows where? Toward that end, and at the possible expense of domestic harmony, we’re launching the Great NBN Home-Groan Source Separation Event. Forget about that co-mingled recycling bin/swimming pool we wheel out to the curb every week, we’ve set aside two basement shelves where we’re going to try, to the best of our ability, to clean, segregate and stack our recyclables. We're talking real OCD stuff here, like tearing the cellophane windows from our bill envelopes. As this stuff is accumulating in the basement the search will be on for the highest price such a highly sanitized and purified raw product can produce and the results will be reported here. 

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