Har Mar, where did you come up with that name? Can Michael and I come over and eat cupcakes and tally all the plastic in your house?

Heather T, you just reminded me of an article I read while I was in college about sea turtle hatchlings mistaking streetlamps for the light of the moon and being run over trying to cross the highway. Now, they are mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish. What will we do to confuse them next?

Radical Garbageman, you’re back! I missed you!

1. Lower property taxes/utility fees: we all pay all the time for our trash and keeping materials out of the waste stream helps hold those costs down. Making sure that what little does go into the waste stream is recycled or composted has the further benefit of generating program revenue that offsets the need for tax increases or utility fee increases. (ok, ok, in many many places a chuck of that money goes to the shareholders of the privatized waste haulers instead of towards the public good, but it still helps hold down the fees.)

2. Landfills aren’t getting any bigger: except for the new ones we have to keep building. Keeping crap out of the landfills (or at least slowing the rate of growth of crap going to the landfills) is sound public policy and will prevent more precious resources being expended on siting and constructing ever more landfills on ever more expensive land in ever more remote locations (since nobody wants one in their back yard, landfills are pushed to the leading edge of urban sprawl and eat us valuable agricultural land and open space). The farther the landfills get from the municipalities they serve, the more diesel gets burned hauling the trash there (which costs more). Global warming, wars for oil, air pollution, little kids with asthma, etc.

3. Promoting reuse and recycling creates jobs: an economy that encourages the use of durable goods instead of disposable and emphasizes recovering the materials from those goods at the end of their product lives is good for the economy. Better quality, longer lasting products require more skilled labor to produce which means higher wages and more spending power for folks in our communities. Recycling and other forms of resource recovery create more and more stable jobs than waste disposal. This grows the economy, broadens the tax base and offsets the need for you to pay more in taxes (because they’re being spread around more).

4. Going green keeps jobs at home: Higher skilled production jobs are more likely to stay in America. Also, the heavier the product the more expensive it is to ship overseas. This broadens the skilled employment base in America and helps hold the line on our out-of-control trade deficit, which helps sustain the value of the dollar against other currencies, keeps more of our national debt at home and saves taxpayers money.

READ MY LIPS: NO NEW BAGS = NO NEW TAXES!

OK. Part II:

We absolutely need to chastise the government for not enhancing these economic trends with stricter regulations, tax breaks for good practices and punitive tax increases for bad practices. We need the government to insist on equitable environmental and labor standards in all trade agreements to support the necessity to shift the manufacturing emphasis to durable from disposable. We need the government to help structure a marketplace where the full resource costs of products are reflected in their purchase price. That we can’t do by reusing our bags and reducing our trash — we have to lobby our elected officials (and throw them out of office when they say no) to take these issues seriously by enacting tax and regulatory structures that incentivize good environmental business practices and by funding a vibrant public sector investment in resource recovery so that we can experiment with better and broader recovery methods free from profit motive.

The End.

You made some excellent points. I say all the time that everyone has to start somewhere; not everyone is ready to take on city hall straight away. It would do no good to pressure the gov and big biz if we aren’t willing to take steps ourselves. Besides, gov and biz (especially biz) won’t change unless they can make money – voting with one’s wallet DOES make a difference!

Ooh, now I’m cranky.

I couldn’t sleep last night and was tossing and turning and thinking about my blog and topics.
The thought of writing about global warming occured to me but it seemed to me as well that many many others are writing about it and doing a much better job than I probably could. Funny I happened upon your article this am.

When I read the bit about “a few turtles” it actually angered me a bit. Those “few turtles” mean alot to us and to just dismiss it in that way was really callous – not to mention unfeelilng or unthinking.

This “Step up to it” rally is something I hadn’t heard of. Am I just hanging out in the wrong places? I’ve seen several sorts of activism lately that folks blog about but it seems like every time I hear about these things it’s too late to participate. I don’t understand if the problem lies with me and the places I frequent on the net or what.

Thank you for doing what you do here – informing people and taking action. I really do appreciate it and admire what you’re doing.

Peace today.