My other obsession? Recycling. Forget the fact that I’d like to be environmentally responsible all the time but am woefully ignorant on some fronts. I never have the foresight in the moment to chose the wine from France over the wine from Australia because the French wine leaves a lower carbon footprint on the shorter trip here. And trying to research further just depresses me with confusion. (Which is worse, a company using plastic bottles that will rarely get recycled or using glass bottles that require 20x the energy to deliver the same service? *makes a gun out of her finger, points at her head and pulls the “trigger”*)

My political view on the environment goes like this: warming seems undeniable. (Sure there are a few scientists who doubt, but unanimous agreement is rarer than flying pigs, especially with different interests paying for opinions.) Is it caused by humans? Well…it’s possibly natural. The Earth has certainly seen it’s share of natural climate changes before. Still, is there any reason why we humans should not take the road to learning to be more responsible and caring for our planet? None. Besides, we’ll never know for sure until it plays out. If we take the environmentalist route and are proven wrong, the result is a more responsible society. (Oh, and some people have failed to benefit financially from continued irresponsibility. Boo hoo.) If we chose to ignore the environment and are wrong, the planet is destroyed (and thus are we). Seems like a pretty obvious gamble to me.

Anyhow, I get mad when I notice my neighbors throwing out gigantic trash bags full of cans, newspapers and plastic bottles. Here there is no excuse as recycling is easy, organized and handy. I feel tangibly guilty when I visit my father in the relative countryside (where there are no recycling facilities). Milk jugs, soup cans and juice bottles fill the trashcans in a jiff. I find this painful to watch, but at least he has an excuse. Left to my own devices you will find me on the floor amidst a pile of business envelopes, ripping the plastic address windows from the paper so that both parts can be recycled. (I know, I have a problem!)

I really admire the system that was in Leuven. There, waste will only be collected from certain bags. General trash in brown, compost in green, plastic in blue. Glass you drop off yourself elsewhere, though there is a fine if glass is found in your trash bags. The twist? “General” trash bags cost about $30 per roll. The recycling bags cost about $5 per roll. I find this extremely fair – you pay tax on the trash services you actually use and there’s a real incentive to recycle. I wish everyplace would be this logical. *sigh* Until that days comes, you’ll find me eating jars of leftover capers just so I don’t have to throw perfectly good food away. Hmmm, anyone know how environmentally damaging vomit is?