So far on this blog it seems that we’ve talked a lot about mummified rats and sorted trash and not much about motivations. Robin and I have a lot of interests, and many of these entertwine with the purchase of this house and our plans for it — organic gardening, animal husbandry, beautiful fir trees, fine woodworking, anachronism, Arts & Crafts style, reading books, wood burning stoves, renewable energy, environmentalism, .. the list goes on.
Yes, we are guilty environmentalists. Is there any other kind? Comedian Cathy Ladman once said that “religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.” Well, by that standard, environmentalism is basically guilt with different neuroticisms. It is impossible to read about the many negative side effects of the modern lifestyle and not feel guilty. This drives some people to don tie-dye and chain themselves to trees. Others buy a Prius and obsessively recycle their Dasani water bottles. To make matters worse, the issues are often so complex and interconnected that a simple rule book for decision making is impossible to find.
I was thinking about this a couple days ago while driving a pickup truck load of rigid plastic (about 200 pounds of mostly broken toys) to be recycle. In the Eugene area Weyerhaeuser Recycling (also called International Paper Recycling, (541) 744-4100) will accept this material at no cost. Since normally this would just go into the landfill, we did our best to sort it out. But was this the right decision?
Well, it depends on what factors you want to consider. From a money standpoint, I made a terrible decision. The drop bin costs me $65/ton to fill. That works out to $6.50 if I just threw my truck load of plastic in the trash. Instead, the recycle center is 24 miles round trip from our house, and my truck presently gets only 9mpg due to an undiagnosed engine problem. With present gas prices, that 2.7 gallons of fuel cost about $9.30. Not only that, but I had to take 4 hours of vacation time to get to the center during their 8-5 business hours. Definitely a bum deal.
But environmentally, it was the right thing, right? Um … maybe? According to this Grist article, recycling one ton of plastic saves 685 gallons of oil. So my 200 pounds of plastic save 68.5 gallons of oil? That’s a good deal for only 2.7 gallons burned to deliver it, but the forklifts at the recycle yard also run on petroleum, as do trucks that will haul away the giant dumpsters, and the factories that will grind it up, melt it down, and turn it into fresh Polystyrene. I seriously doubt that those oil savings numbers really took into account all the factors either.
The point of all this is not to argue the merits of plastic recycling, but to highlight the challenges of making good “green” decisions. Renovating a home is nothing but a continuous stream of decisions, and most of them–roofing products, water and space heating, insulation upgrades, flooring and wall materials–have environmental, aesthetic, and monetary advantages and disadvantages. Assuming the complexity doesn’t drive us to madness, we’ll probably share a lot of those decisions along the way. In the end, we can’t hope to have the perfect ‘green’ house … just a less guilty one.
