08.12.09

Recycling Innsbrook

Posted in Experiences and reflections at 12:00 pm by admin

“Out of the mouths of babes.”

I like that saying a lot. Heck, who am I kidding, I like most sayings a lot, which is kind of a paradox, because I have always believed sweeping generalizations are inherently wrong and typically a path to bad thinking. But I am also very prone to look for shortcuts, and often “old sayings” or truisms are just that — a shortcut to summing up how the world works.

Now, having gotten that off my chest… “Out of the mouths of babes.” My family was recently driving through Innsbrook in our minivan (hereafter referred to as the “family truckster”).  Someone put an empty drink bottle in a mixed trash bag. Four-year-old Riley asked, “Is that going in recycling?” 

I answered, “Probably not. It will probably get thrown in the gas station trash can when we stop on the way home.”

And Riley replied, “But you’re killing Innsbrook.”

His comment caught me off guard. I asked him to explain. He said that since recycling keeps trash out of trash mountains (we drive by a huge one on our way to his grandmother’s house), we’re killing Innsbrook by not recycling.  And for him, Innsbrook is synonymous with nature.

Of course, Riley doesn’t understand that Innsbrook’s security staff is more than capable of keeping the East St. Louis trash mountain from expanding through our gates and that the danger of a rogue bauxite mine popping up on the Innsbrook landscape is low indeed.

But what he does seem to understand is the truism, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls,  it tolls for thee.” (I really do like these.)  Because all of Riley’s nature play is done at Innsbrook, he tends to see Innsbrook as what suffers when we don’t recycle — and for him that’s crucial, because Innsbrook is kind of a panacea for him.  Whenever Riley wants to cheer someone up, he says, “Imagine we’re at Innsbrook.” And one’s personal panacea is not something to mess up by putting trash in the wrong bin.

And really, as it turns out, Riley’s more right than I realized. Here’s how recycling saves Innsbrook:

• Recycling one ton of newspaper saves enough energy to heat a home for six weeks lowering all our energy costs.
• Recycling one ton of plastic saves almost four barrels of oil.
• Recycling one glass bottle saves enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for four hours.
• The 953,900 tons of material recycled in our area in 2003 saved enough electricity to completely power 124,000 homes for one year.
• By recycling 116,000 ton of paper last year, more than 1.8 million trees are still standing.
• In 2003 recycling in our area reduced green house emissions by more than 536,000 metric tons of carbon equivalent, which is comparable to the carbon emissions of 405,000 cars.

So, all in all, recycling saves the air we breath at Innsbrook, it slows global warming, it preserves trees, it brings down heating costs and the price we pay at the pump.

That’s just a few of the ways recycling has kept our trash-happy society from “killing Innsbrook.”

At Innsbrook, we have adopted a recycling program that has literally cut our annual contribution to landfills in half. Today, 50% of the residential trash that goes out of Innsbrook is recycled by volume. Nationally, 33% of municipal trash is recycled (measured by weight). To really know how we stack up, we will have to find a way to measure the weight of Innsbrook’s recycling — but irregardless, we have come a long way. 

But of course, we can always do better. Germany is one of the top recycling countries in the world with 46% of its trash (by weight) going to recycling.

What can Innsbrook residents do to “not kill Innsbrook”? First and foremost, RECYCLE! Second, make sure you don’t put any non-recyclables in our recycling dumpsters.  It ruins the entire load and everything in those recycle dumpsters goes to landfills. And finally — talk it up with your neighbors.

As a country and a community, we’ve come a long way in not killing Innsbrook — but we can do even better.

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