Ridicule Sightings - I am Kind
(
Spiritual Living : Kwokmanation)
國民,
kwokmanation,
民化島,
ridicule,
ridiculous,
ridicule sightings,
recycling
Ridicule Sightings - I am Kind
By Kwokman
Date: 18th December, 2009
A comment about recyclable beverage containers turned into a passionate protest last week. I said that since all households in New York City are required to recycle their recyclable trash, beverage containers should no longer carry a refund. That instantly turned into an outcry of heartlessness against poor elderly who live on these aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Before you too overreact to this mere suggestion, please calm down and read the facts with an open mind.
Refunds on recyclable beverage containers is good intention that has never lived up to its expectation. The idea is that if the containers are worth a few pennies, you would probably return them for a refund rather than send them to landfill. In reality these aluminum cans and bottles take various paths depending on what kind of a person you are.
If you are thrifty or you care about the environment at all, you would save all these cans and bottles and return them to the designated collection centers. However, if you care about the environment, you probably care about your own health as well and have low consumption of prepackaged beverages. It might take you months collecting these empty containers before a trip to the collection center is worth taking. You’d better have lots of storage space because these containers could be big. By the time you’ve collected enough empty containers justifying the trip, they are already covered in dust and quite disgusting. If you also neglected to rinse these sugar-loaded containers properly before stowing them away, they would be loaded with vermin by now, not very sweet. Then you put on your utility gloves and carefully pack these dirty containers into plastic bags and to the collection center they go.
On the other hand, you could just throw the empty container into garbage, nice and clean. Five cents apiece is well spent any time when you can avoid handling filthy vermin. What about the environment then? That’s where the poor old ladies, or whoever they turn out to be, come into the picture. They search through trash cans, drive ways and back alleys. They do the dirty work that you’d rather not do. All the while, recyclables are being recycled, poor old ladies earn an honest living, everyone is happy and all is well. You might even have the urge to separate the refundable containers and leave them out for the old ladies. How kind you are! Poor old ladies don’t have the strength and skills for a regular job! They could starve to death if not for these refundable containers! Good deed you’ve done! Pat on the back for you! You practically save their lives!
I hate to ruin it when you feel so good about yourself but I can’t help but do a little mathematics. Each bottle or can is worth five cents. One must collect 1000 refundable containers to make 50 dollars. Can you even imagine how many blocks one has to cover, how many trash cans one has to dig through before 1000 containers are collected? If one can walk that far and haul that much bulk around day in and day out, resisting the bitter cold of winter and sustaining the intense heat of summer, she or he is probably physically fit enough for some moderately manual labor. All this hard and dirty work earns them merely 50 dollars a day, even lower than the minimum wage mandated by law in New York City. If you still think you help them by neglecting your own responsibility on recycling, you should spend a day and try to collect 1000 refundable beverage containers in your own neighborhood and see for yourself if you’re really helping them. Leaving out refundable containers simply encourage them to hang onto this kind of abnormal life style, reinforcing their abnormal behavior. Abnormal they will likely become, if they weren’t to begin with, living in such isolation, visiting everyone’s drive way yet not knowing anybody. Imagine what it must do to their health, going through rubbish with their own hands.
After all the hardship the bottle collectors have to go through, not all of them care to put all the trash back into the trash cans either. That creates another health issue. Trashes that end up on the street attract rats and strait animals, help spread deceases and stir up tension among neighbors. Whenever you leave a couple of bottles by the sidewalk or throw a bunch of bread crumbs out for the pigeons by the way, you might be the only kind person in your neighborhood who feels good about it. You encourage strangers to come back and go through your neighbors’ trash, along with their personal documents, financial statements, receipts to expansive jewelry, school and work schedules, credit card numbers and information about their little kids and friends of their kids. Come on kind people, there are better ways to do good deeds and cleaner ways to feel good. Donation to credible charitable organizations is far more effective than encouraging poor people to isolate themselves from society. It enables Salvation Army to keep their soup kitchens open and Red Cross to provide emergency medical assistance to people around the world. Abolishing the tiny refund on beverage containers will encourage people to dispose of these cans and bottles as soon as they’re done with the content inside, not three months later when they have become breeding bed for vermin and bacteria. Since everyone already has access to receptacles of recyclable trash right at home, there isn’t much incentive for them to mix recyclable items in their rubbish. Moreover, there will be no more strangers visiting your backyard for soda cans. As a result, recycling can be done in a much more timely and sanitary fashion. There’s no need to run research to determine whether it is viable. New Jersey has run their recycling program like that for as far as I know and it does work.