You probably know this about me, or have figured it out if you have read my blog for a while. I was born in the fifties, was too young to truly understand the sixties. I graduated from high school in the seventies. I tell you this simply to put a time frame around my comments today. I think it will be important.
Garbage. Let's talk about garbage. The world I was born into handled garbage in a very simple way. Everything was disposed of through the trash can you hauled to the curb once a week, or it was burned. At my house, we burned paper from the house and the office in an incinerator. It was basically a barrel on wheels set up to provide air to a fire and elevate the temperature and rate of burn to turn everything you put into it to ash. It was very effective. One of my jobs around the house was to empty the trash cans in mom's home office and burn all the paperwork. This was the most effective way to deal with the personal and confidential information from the clients.
So, garbage/trash left our house primarily by being burned or via the garbage truck,. Oh, and a couple of other things. We had a public dump we could always take things to. It was an old rock quarry you could unload things into and the city would manage the process from there. We also had a hole at the bottom of my grandparent's horse pasture we would dump things into and then once a year, hopefully on a calm day, we burned it all in a big fire. It was typically exciting as there were usually aerosol cans in the mix resulting in explosions or in the alternative. The fire might get away from us a little bit - another story all together.
I know, that's a lot about garbage, right? I think the information is important as I need to compare it to today. Today, in my garage there are two trash bins. They are the same size and one is for "single stream" recycling and the other is for trash. The trash is picked up once a week and the recycling every other week. The interesting part is the recycling bin is always overflowing. I could probably use a second container for the recycling. As a comparison, my garbage container could be a quarter of the size it is and there would still be plenty of space. Many weeks the container only has one trash bag at the bottom, only because we went around the house and collected everything.
How did this all change from the seventies until now? Was there a moment in time it was legislated or ruled to change? No, it happened a little bit at a time, one small step, continuing to move toward the point we are at today. I am also sure we're not at the end of the process. Products will continue to be made more recyclable and recycling will continue to get easier.
Now, how does this all tie to the word ginormous? When the movement moved from hauling and burning garbage to recycling a large part of it, the overall problem was ginormous. There was no way one person could take it on and have any success. What it took was a significant percentage of folks deciding they would do what they could. It would have been easier to throw up their hands and say it was impossible for them, as a single individual, to accomplish anything around recycling. Interestingly enough, I know there are people who still take this position. In the USA, the latest number I could find was 80.1 million tons recycled in the latest reporting year. This is far from nothing. It is still only slightly over a third of the trash produced, but it is a far cry from where we were in the sixties and the seventies. Trash was a ginormous problem back then, and it is less of a problem today.
What I am trying to get at today is a way to think about the ginormous problems of the day. Pick one. Whatever is most important to you. The odds are you are not able to "fix" the problem by yourself. It may take years of starts and stops, of taking two steps forward and one back, to actually have an impact on the problem. But personally doing something about a ginormous problem today will have an effect on it down the road. Don't wait. Decide you are going to do something about the ginormous problem you see as critical today.
I am reminded of an old expression: you can only eat an elephant one way; one bite at a time. I encourage you to think about which ginormous problems is your elephant and take the first bite. You may never even see the change, but it will be there, because of your involvement. I know collectively we can improve our world and make it a better place. And it starts over again, every day. Every day there is the opportunity for each of us to change our world in incredible ways.
Go ahead, began a change today, or move a change forward.
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