Doing What We Can


I could have spat out some facts, like each person in the US leaves a legacy of about 90,000 pounds of waste in their lifetime. Or that Americans generate 4.4 pounds of trash per person per day – more than any other industrialized nation. Or that the current annual rate of recycling steel saves enough electricity to power Los Angeles for 10 years. When you consider that we only recycle about half of the steel we generate and that the amount we recycle accounts for just about 5% of our total recycling, you can see that the total potential impact of a national recycling program is staggering.

If we each did what we could, we would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 850 pounds per year per person. We would save 500,000 trees per week from the Sunday paper alone, and 900,000,000 trees per year total. We would compost almost half of what we currently put into landfills, and recycle most of the rest. We would reduce pollution, save energy, create jobs, and save space on a massive scale. Simply put, we would change the face of our nation.

Which reminded me of a story told to me once by my friend Tiffany, then aged eight: There was an old man walking down a beach littered with fish which had been stranded by the tide. Ahead on the beach he saw a little girl, frantically flipping the dying fish one at a time back into the water. He approached her and, gesturing at the expanse of sand, said,

“Little girl, don’t be silly. There are millions of fish stranded on the beach. How will you make a difference throwing one or two back in?”

The little girl paused, fish in hand. “It makes a difference to this one,” she replied, and tossed it back in.

For more recycling facts:

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