April 20, 2009 – I am as much of an environmental advocate as Paul Devine (See "Recycling Group In Talks To Hand Over Glass Crusher") but our arguments would be stronger if we were more careful with numbers.
In the Source story about the efforts of St. John residents to recycle their glass bottles, Devine was quoted as saying: "…the territory generates 45 million cans a year that could be recycled … and there is four times that much in glass bottles."
That would be 180 million bottles a year.
Wow, I thought, that?s a lot of drinking bottled liquids, and emptying jam and mustard jars.
Then I did the math; in a territory with 108,000 people in it the glass container consumption, at 180 million a year, would equal a smashing 1,667 units per capita per year. That works out to about four and half glass containers for every man, woman, and child in the territory, every day!
If my wife and I were using bottles at that rate I would be hauling 63 bottles (9 bottles x 7 days) to the curb each Monday morning; in fact, it is rarely more than a dozen, unless we had a party.
Let?s say that one bottle per human per day is about right, rather than 4.5 of them, that would still mean that the Virgin Islands is generating some 40 million bottles a year; that?s a big enough figure to warrant a significant recycling program.
As Mr. Devine knows, there are many good reasons for recycling glass and aluminum containers. On a local basis, it means that much less space is used in the landfill, a more important consideration in small islands than in the wide-open spaces of Wyoming, for instance.
Globally, recycling these two kinds of containers means that new ones are made with much less use of energy than creating the containers out of raw material, such as aluminum ore and glass-quality sand.
The problem, of course, in small islands, is that the plants that use the recycled goods are not to be found locally – one must put them in a cargo ship headed for a distant urban area, such as Miami or New Orleans, where they can be processed into new containers. This makes the economics of such operations a bit less attractive.
Decades ago, when I lived at the outer edge of the New York suburbs, the shipping problem was no problem all. People were encouraged to bring their empty bottles to a central point, behind the Harding Township hall that also served as the firehouse. There was a partially enclosed area, about the size of a one-car garage, for the bottles.
At the end of the month one of the road department employees would drive a front-loader into the bottle collection, moving back and forth till the bottles were all smashed up; then he used the same machine to load a dump truck. Then he would drive that truck into Newark with the Township’s collection of broken glass, and return a couple of hours later with a check for the Township clerk.
The Township was doing the right thing for their residents and for the environment. And it was doing so without buying specialized machinery, and by using a single worker a few hours a month.
It made sense then and it makes even more sense today.
Editor’s note: David S. North lives in Arlington, Virginia, reads the Source, and likes numbers.
