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John Wenz and Captain Planet hate it when I throw aluminum cans in the trash. It's not that I hate the earth and the planeteers that guard it. In fact, I am very much in favor of conservation, but I wasn't raised by my parents to recycle or conserve natural resources, so it's never been a habit for me.
John's said to me more than once when he's seen me throw plastic bottles in the trash that "Of all people, I'd think you for sure would be a recycler." My shame is immense.
According to recycling.unl.edu, in 2005 the University of Nebraska-Lincoln recycled about 646 tons of paper. Probably a half-pound of that was my doing. Maybe less.
I know that recycling paper saves trees, which human life on our planet needs to transform carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen. Deforestation is advancing at an atrocious rate worldwide. According to the Forestry and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the world is losing about 32 million acres of forest every year. To put that in perspective, the total area of roads and parking lots in the United States is about 39 million acres.
And I know that recycling helps reduce the need for landfills. I've been to a landfill a couple times, and the quantity of garbage there was beyond my ability to mentally apprehend, even with my minor in math. The only thing I can compare it to is the way my mind was blown when I saw the Grand Canyon.
I know that there are many more reasons for recycling, from the medical research advantages of global biodiversity to the reduction of drinking-water-contaminating toxins that are the byproducts of industrial materials manufacturing. So from henceforth, I'm going to start recycling.
Now, this won't be like when I started playing racquetball by buying a few blue rubber balls that I ended up losing before setting foot in the rec center. I'm serious about this. I want my children to have clean water to drink and an earth to live on. And I want modern medicine someday to be able to repair my bodily ailments that will be the lifelong consequence of lack of exercise, racquetball or otherwise.
John just caught me putting white paper in the trashcan under my desk. It'll take a while to get in the habit.
But starting immediately, I'm going to start switching off devices that use electricity when I don't need them, and using the energy-saving options on my computers. Some electrical devices use electricity whenever they're plugged in, even if not in use, and so I'll make sure to either unplug those or switch them off at the surge protector.
For sure, I'm going to start saving newsprint, white paper, aluminum cans and plastic bottles.
It used to be that when I filled up at the gas pump, I would try to remember to grab the fuel that was 10% ethanol, regardless of the price, because a farmer friend of mine said it helped out he and his kind in Nebraska.
But recently I've heard news reports that ethanol isn't a very good alternative fuel, as far as impact on soil nutrients and erosion of removing corn stover from the ground, for example, and how corn irrigation and ethanol plant operation can massively deplete natural water supplies.
There are about 114 ethanol production plants in the United States, and about 80 more on the way. Ethanol production is expected to double in the next year in the U.S., buoyed by governmental subsidies.
Ethanol is supposedly more environmentally friendly than gasoline because, while combusting gasoline releases greenhouse gases that had been up till now locked in long hydrocarbon chains in the earth's crust, there's no net effect on quantities of greenhouse gases when we combust ethanol made from agricultural sources. When plants grow, they capture atmospheric carbon in their cellular structure.
Plant enough long-lived trees and we can actually start removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Plant corn and then later burn alcohols produced through fermentation of that corn, and you don't end up with any more greenhouse gases floating around than you started with.
It's still unclear just how good ethanol is for the environment. Right now it's being touted as a triple savior for the goals of energy independence from the Middle East, global warming and the family farmer.
Given the ecological impact of farming corn farming, the self-apparent foolishness of burning food in our engines instead of using it to feed starving people and the anti-capitalist farm subsidies that point to economic inefficiency, I still don't know about ethanol - or biodiesel for that matter.
But I do know that the more I walk, bicycle, carpool, minimize travel or use public transit rather than drive my car, the less impact I will have on the environment. I only drive my car once a week right now, and I drive it pretty short distances, but with the warmer weather, I'm going to try to cut back beyond that.
I just got back from the DN restroom where John Wenz was washing bottles for recycling in the sink. What a show-off - I mean, "role model."
