My first job in Marietta was in recycling, sort of. I was neighbors with John Semon, the owner of The Marietta Food Center, and he hired me to sort soft drink bottles. At that time, customers paid a deposit for the bottles, then brought them back all gross, dirty and mixed in with other brands. I would sort them back to the correct brands’ cases and stack them in a little shed behind the store. The bottles were then trucked away and then washed and cleaned to be refilled with Coke, or Pepsi or Double Cola for someone else to consume. It was recycling before recycling was a thing. This was around 1973. The first Earth Day was in 1970, so recycling was still a work in progress at the time. The annual observance of Earth Day was yesterday.
My job soon moved indoors to stock shelves, unload trucks, take orders to customer cars and eventually run the register. It would end up being my only experience in retail.
I would never stop recycling though. Marietta has curbside recycling, which is great. Put your items out and they go to the great recycling sorting machine somewhere. I see bins all over town. If you find an extra water bottle in one of yours that you left out, it might be mine. The City of Marietta has trash cans around town, but for some reason, no recycling bins.
I do not live in the city though, so for me recycling means loading the back of the Honda up with bags and plastic bins and driving them to the recycling center on Gilman Avenue.
It is truly impressive how many people do the same. We have different size containers for plastic, cans, newspaper, thin cardboard, glass and steel cans. They fill the back of my car when I take them to the center once a month and conveniently all nest inside each other when empty. They fill a small corner of my garage when being used. Because of this, my wife and I only generate approximately one small bag of trash per week.
My efforts at home though are small when compared to what we do here at work. As a company we are big recyclers, in fact we recycle nearly everything that we use. Let’s start with paper.
We buy newsprint in large rolls. Around 6-mile-long rolls to be exact. The wastepaper, meaning the smudged copies from the start of printing, is recycled after being put into huge bales. We keep back issues for six months, after that they get recycled as well. At the plant, newspapers are chopped up, made into a sludge and then become paper again or else are turned into things like egg containers. Last year we recycled nearly half a million pounds of newspapers. The end of the giant rolls of paper are recycled as well. Area businesses and individuals frequently get them from us to be used for packing.
The cardboard that the paper is shipped in gets recycled too, as do the pallets that are used to ship items to us.
We give the wood pallets away to anyone who wants to use them for another purpose. The plastic ones are reused.
Newspapers are printed on aluminum plates. These sheets are a little bigger than the newspaper page you are holding, and about as thick as a can of soda. After printing they go into a giant box to be later melted down and recycled. Last year we recycled more than 13 tons of aluminum plates.
The ink that is used to print the words that you are reading is not recycled. It is made with soybeans, which are of course renewable and are in fact grown in places like Washington County.
It is smart for companies to recycle; it saves money because they generate less trash and they earn a little revenue selling the materials. It is smart for individuals to recycle because it cuts down on the amount of your stuff that will end up in a landfill and still be there long after you are gone. It is sad that one of our lasting legacies is in fact, the mountain of stuff that we threw away in our lifetimes and will sit for hundreds of years in a landfill.
Art Smith is online manager; he can be reached at [email protected]
