The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume LXXXIX

I know that sounds ominous. It should.

Because humans are edging toward the tipping point of destroying life on Earth. This can no longer be disputed.

This newsletter is the first of six weekly editions as we count down to Earth Day. This series will focus on recycling, fossil fuels, mining, pollution, climate change, and the existential threat of annihilation as the result of war.

We may not even make it until Earth Day.

Since I was a little kid I was taught to recycle. Growing up with a hoarder who stacked piles of newspapers to the ceiling I was keenly aware that we were doing so with a purpose. It was to recycle the paper to save trees. My father was not the most committed when it came to the actual recycling part. He meant well, but we always had way more papers in the house than we ever delivered to the recycling depot, except when welfare workers got involved and made it happen. Then they finally emptied the house. But he eventually filled it up again.

In addition to newspapers that would never be read he also collected a bunch of stuff that would never be used. He did that over and over until he died with a house full of garbage that ended up being hauled away to scrapheaps anyway, but all the newspapers he saved did get recycled. So, there is that.

While my Dad’s attempt to save every newspaper he could put his hands on was a misguided attempt at both recycling and building a library, it did instill a sense of saving the planet, and as a result, I am not a hoarder, but a recycler. His success was teaching me that it was better to use old newspapers to create new newspapers so that we would not have to cut down more trees. Sadly, that message which resonates with me, was not passed on to a lot of the rest of the world.

I do not read newspapers. I get my news via electronic transmission; online and on TV. I can’t stand the feel of newspapers. I mean that literally. I find the feeling of a newspaper in my hands disgusting. Not because a bunch of trees were cut down to get it to me, but because I grew up in a house full of newspapers, then I delivered newspapers throughout Detroit as a teenager. I did not find it as repellent in my youth as I do today, so that is more personal, but the necessity of newspapers is long gone.

Even though I sold yellow pages advertising for nearly a decade, which was like delivering a forest to the masses every year, I still did not find it as disturbing as a daily newspaper. My parents-in-law were reporters. I knew lots of people who worked for newspapers and yellow pages. These were great industries which supported many families. I was sometimes conflicted about working for businesses which relied on the devastation of forests, but placated myself with the fact that most of the paper we used was recycled. It said so somewhere in the fine print.

We don’t have to worry about that too much anymore, as Yellow Pages and print newspapers have virtually disappeared, thanks to the internet.

Still, it always makes me feel good to recycle. I take the time to separate plastics from glass and tin and cardboard. I learned from a coworker that I should always rinse out my yogurt cups because when you leave residue on plastic it can ruin the batch of recyclable plastic and then it can’t be used again. I thought to myself Isn’t that just a waste of water? How clean it needs to be before shipping off to the recycling center is debatable, but I still do it. Better safe than sorry.

I have been recycling my whole life. When I moved to Clearwater Florida I boasted to friends who did not live here about how great our recycling program was. They used to give us a couple of different baskets to put out at the curb to sort newspapers from plastic and glass, and sort we did. Happily, joyfully, hauling all those neat little baskets to the curb every Tuesday. Then the city did one better - single stream recycling. Put it all in one basket. They gave us huge bright blue bins with yellow tops and said we could put everything in here all together - but not Styrofoam! Or electronics! Or hard plastics, like old toys or defunct garden gnomes, just your basic glass and plastic bottles and cardboard and paper and tin cans. They even printed a handy guide on top to show us what not to put in there so that we didn’t mess up the recycling and ruin the whole batch.

So we boasted about it and happily, joyfully complied. We were saving the Earth.

Until we found out we weren’t. Turns out that for the last four years our recycling that we worked so hard to clean and separate from the trash was just dumped in a landfill anyway. It was not being recycled at all.

Sure, there is going to be an investigation and we might get some money back for paying for a service we didn’t get. Sure, there has to be accountability. Sure, somebody probably ought to be fired. Sure, we wasted a lot of time and effort separating all the recyclables from banana peels and eggshells, but the bigger point here is that what could have been recycled was not.

In addition to trashing the recycling the city of Clearwater adds to the garbage with little magazines that come in the mail every month that nobody asks for and I don’t know if everyone reads, but they fill them with feel-good stories about how they are blowing money on advertising what a great place Clearwater is by wrapping vehicles with anti-litter messages for anyone who happens to see and read them. But these aren’t electric vehicles so they are just pumping more carbon into the atmosphere, more than most vehicles, because they are driving high traffic routes to stoke awareness of trash on the beach, instead of spending money to clean up trash on the beach.

Then, two pages later, they let us know that household electronics can go right into the trash bins instead of being placed on the curb. They once told us to put the electronics on the curb and the city would take them away, safely, to be properly disposed of. Guess that’s out the window. Once they figured out it was cheaper to not do that, they stopped.

Shame on Clearwater.

I like living here. I do. But I don’t like being lied to and I certainly don’t like that when I thought I was recycling, I find out that I was not.

I am so happy the FBI has made an appearance and may be investigating this matter.

But this is not about me and my wasted time and effort, or that I paid for recycling that did not happen, it is about the fact that tons of things that should have been recycled were not and that somebody knew it, and they said nothing.

You would think that one guy on a garbage hauler would have blown the whistle. One person could have said something a couple of years ago and spoken up to help stop this from happening.

It is sickening to think about.

To know that we have the power to do something that lowers our carbon footprint, to keep fewer dioxins from penetrating our air, to keep garbage from piling up and not even rotting away, that it could be recycled instead of ending up in the ocean, and not do anything about it, that is the real crime here.

This was a true conspiracy. If it were not, somebody would have said something. I hope somebody goes to jail for this. For a long time.

Garbage is everyone’s problem and when recycling that could happen does not, that is just plain wrong. Just like any other crime, if you see something like this happen in your town, say something about it, because this is a crime against all of us.

Thanks for reading.

If you are new to the Rembis Report and would like to read any of the previous issues, PLEASE CLICK HERE to access the archives. To read it from the beginning, PLEASE GET A COPY of The Rembis Report: An Observation.

Click here to read The Road To The Brink Of Oblivion - Part II