So the recycling message has been out there for years. We’ve been encouraged to recycle paper, cardboard, plastics, clothes, metal, electronic waste and a whole range of other things.

We almost religiously fill our recycling crates and bins every week with all that stuff that we once just threw away and we feel good about doing something towards saving our planet. We see stories about more and more waste items that can now be recycled and that makes us feel good too. We’re even beginning to see stories of places across the United States that are recycling Styrofoam.

Yes, Styrofoam … that packaging material that you find wrapped around just about every small appliance, toy etc. You may wonder what on earth could be recycled out of that white foam but there is a company in the United States that will take all the Styrofoam it can get because it recycles the stuff into baseboards and moldings for use around the home.

And doesn’t the news about that ghastly white stuff that breaks into little beads that end up everywhere make you feel even better? We’re doing something positive for the environment … we’re saving the planet for our kids and our grandchildren … we’re being responsible citizens … we’re being environmentally friendly. Yes all those thoughts are guaranteed to make you feel good about the effort that you’re putting into recycling.

But did you know that there are still many parts of this country where little or no recycling is done at all? Did you know that every year we still throw away enough aluminum cans to build many jumbo jets? Did you know that the very basic items that so many of us recycle every week still become landfill in many large towns and cities across the country because no one seems to be prepared to make the effort that’s required to get recycling started in those communities?

Let’s face it folks …we really not well-advanced when it comes to saving the planet through recycling at all. As long as there is just one town where recycling is not a way of life or one town or city where the authorities are still “considering” recycling we can’t stop pushing for change … we can’t rest on our laurels … and we have to keep working towards achieving a goal of 100% recycling.

For those of us who have been working at achieving this goal for years that can be rather daunting because we’ve worked so hard and there’s still so much more to do. For those of us who are recent converts to recycling then a target of 100% recycling can sound like something that’s impossible to achieve … especially when there are still so many people out there who think that we can go on wasting resources for ever.

But the reality is that we do need to achieve that 100% goal. We’ve been wasting our resources for so long that now we have absolutely no option but to get totally serious about recycling. We’ve been stuffing our trash into landfills for so long that we’ve now reached the point where many towns and cities are running out of places to put their rubbish.

There are just so many old mines, old quarries, handy ravines and other places where rubbish can be placed and when those places are gone what will we do with our rubbish then? That’s why we need to go on pushing everyone to get serious about recycling. The more we recycle the less garbage there will be that we have to dispose of.

So now is not the time to get complacent just because we feel good about the recycling effort that we’re making on an individual level. Now is the time to push those in authority even harder. We need to bug our local representatives with information about recycling … with pleas to open their eyes to the terrible impact on the environment that all our un-recycled rubbish is having … and encouragement to get serious about recycling or we’ll look for representatives that do care about the environment.

We need to write letters to the newspapers, hold rallies and town meetings. We need to make a lot more noise about recycling because sooner or later the people who can make it happen will realize that the only way to stop all that noise about recycling is to actually implement it in their towns and cities.

And we need to go on doing that for quite some time to come. If we’re serious about saving our planet and leaving a half-decent environment to our kids and grandkids then we need to stay serious about recycling.

We need to realize that this is like a war. We’ve won some skirmishes … we’ve even won some important battles … but we’ve got a long way to go before we can say that we’ve won the war and so we have to stick at it till we do.

There are times when some of the people in this fine country of ours just make me wonder. You only have to look around to see that we are destroying this planet … we are making it uninhabitable for our children and their children … and yet we go on ignoring the obvious.

Look up at the horizon and you can see that pollution from our factories and our motor vehicles is destroying the quality of the air we breathe. Look at the rubbish we carelessly throw away and you quickly realize that it’s full of material that we could be recycling.

Look in our rivers and waterways at the junk we toss in there and results of the chemicals that we allow industries to flush into those waterways. The water isn’t clean and clear anymore … in fact few of us can remember a time when it was but we can see that it’s getting much worse. The fish don’t live in our rivers anymore and if a few still manage to survive there they are so contaminated with mercury and other elements that they’re dangerous to our health if we eat them.

Look out into the oceans around the planet and see the oil slicks, the dead zones where nothing can live and floating masses of plastic that are beginning to appear. Hell, Columbus once ran into the Sargasso Sea … a huge area of seaweed … but if he was sailing today he could end up trapped in a mass of garbage that he might never have escaped from.

Look beneath the surface of those oceans and see that the stocks of fish that once fed us so well are now fast disappearing. Some of it’s due to over-fishing but a lot is due to pollution and the rubbish we allow to be washed into the oceans. Turtles, dolphins, sharks and even some whale species are disappearing and our pollution and rubbish is a major cause of that.

Only last week authorities in Australia pulled a large shark from the water that was too ill to escape and when they looked inside they found it’s stomach filled with plastic bags and discarded fishing lines and fish hooks … there was simply no room for food. And that’s just one example of something that’s happening day after day.

And those in authority … our representatives in all levels of government … are doing nothing about it. Sure you and I can go on recycling and being environmentally friendly until we’re blue in the face but until governments take an active and positive stand to combat the pollution and the destruction of our environment nothing will be achieved.

So why aren’t our representatives at local, state and federal level doing nothing to prevent the degradation of our planet? Obviously they want to save jobs … save the economy … and save anything else that big business and vested interests want to save just so long as it doesn’t stop them from making obscene profits at the expense of the planet and at the expense of our children and grandchildren.

As soon as any step … even a small step … is taken to try and clean up the environment by controlling the major polluters there’s a mighty cry that jobs will be lost, the economy will be destroyed and the world will end tomorrow.

Of course all that is just drama-speak and what the people who are making those claims really mean is that big business won’t be able to make quite so much profit and the CEOs won’t get such obscene salaries if any curbs are placed on the way they do business. They don’t seem to understand that there’s no point in all those big profits and obscene salaries when planet dies and people can’t live here anymore

For some reason the people who want to fight against our efforts to improve the environment and save the planet just seem to have this mental block that prevents them from believing that the world can’t take any more of their polluting ways. Instead they seem to believe that they can pollute and destroy the environment for ever without their being any adverse effects on their fellow Americans.

It’s crazy that they can’t see … or don’t care about … the crisis that they are pushing us into and it’s even crazier when you consider that all their arguments are just baseless.

Sure if we change the way we do things so that we’re more environmentally friendly their will be job losses in the very short term … sure their profits will go down in the very short term and their obscene salaries will end. But those profits and those salaries and those jobs in polluting industries are not sustainable.

It’s what will come after that will make the changes so worthwhile. If we move from an economy that relies on industries that are destroying our planet and re-focus on an economy that’s based on industries that will sustain our planet there will be jobs … perhaps even more jobs than we have today. There will be profits for industries that don’t pollute our planet and there will be high salaries for CEOs who work towards improving the environment by providing products that don’t destroy our world but do make our life more comfortable and more enjoyable.

It’s not some delusional dream … it really is the way things will be if only we can get our representatives in government to listen to us instead of listening to those who want to sustain their profits and salaries and don’t care if they destroy the planet while they do it.

So what can we do to make that happen? Well we can start by writing to our representatives and telling them that if they want to be re-elected then they had better wake up and remember who elected them. We also need to tell that that it’s time they started supporting our President as he tries to turn us around and lead us into an environmentally friendly world.

We also need to start writing to the papers so that our voice will be heard and we also need to start boycotting those industries that want to go on polluting with absolutely no thought for the future.

And we need to start doing all that right now!

Just the other day I was talking to one of our daughters. She’s an over 25 year old and she lives in the same city but over on the other side of town. Of course, even on her side of town the city provides a recycling service for all the usual things that we can recycle.

The recycling service collects glass, plastics, steel and aluminum cans, newspapers and cardboards and my daughter dutifully puts all that kind of material out in the trash so I was surprised to hear her declare that recycling is a drama. Now that took me by surprise because how much more convenient can the city make the whole recycling thing for residents?

But our daughter wasn’t talking about recycling the common things that just about all of us do … as long as we live somewhere that encourages its citizens to recycle. No she was talking about recycling other things … things that we really don’t want to see disappear into landfill because they’re full of substances that are anything but environmentally friendly but at the same time they’re not so obviously recyclable.

Cell Phones

For her the drama was what to do with the handful of old cell phones that she had stashed in drawer back at her place. And I guess that many of us are like our daughter, we have a whole bunch of old cell phones and every time we move to a new plan with our carriers we add another cell phone to the collection in the drawer.

Actually you might be surprised to learn just how many disused cell phones there are out there in world. The Environmental Protection Agency estates that there are 200 million cell phone users in the United States and each one of us has 2.5 cell phones sitting around in a drawer.

In case you’re mind is somewhere else right now let me do the math for you. With 200 million cell phone users that each has 2.5 old cell phones that means that there are around 500 million old cell phones out there. If you put them all together you would have a huge mountain of junk that could cause several environmental catastrophes.

Now that is a potential drama … and not the sort of drama our daughter was referring to.

Sadly it doesn’t have to be a potential drama of either kind because all the major carriers have recycling programs and they will take your old cell phones and dispose of them in a way that won’t destroy the environment.

AT&T will take just about any old cell phone and it doesn’t matter who your carrier was or who made the cell phone. All you have to do is take the old phone into one of their retail stores that’s near you and they’ll do the rest. If you don’t have an AT&T store near you hit their website and look for the pre-addressed and pre-paid labels that you can print off and attach to a package that contains your old phones.

Verizon has a similar scheme and so does T-Mobile. T-Mobile takes the phone recycling idea a little further for they’re prepared to take your old PDAs as well. Sprint will take your old cell phone and, if it’s still in working order they’ll even give you a credit on your account. The amount of the credit depends on the value of your old cell phone but the most you’ll get is $50.00.

Appliances

It’s almost impossible to fit an old fridge or washing machine into your recycling bin or crate … not that I’ve tried but … you know … sometimes you can just get a feeling for these things. But just because you can’t fit your old fridge into a recycling bin doesn’t mean that you can’t recycle it and you don’t have to drag it out to the dump or the recycling centre to do that either.

A while back my partner bought an old freezer for $30.00 for a one-off family get-together at our place. While it worked fine when we picked it up it managed to die a week before the event so we were stuck with some junk that was too big to recycle in the normal way and not something that the guys at the dump wanted to see come their way either.

Being a resourceful female my partner looked through the local phone book and finally found a scrap metal dealer. He jumped at the chance to come and collect that old freezer because, as he told me later, the steel in the casing is worth money to him. It’s not worth enough for him to buy it from us but it is worth enough to not only cover the removal costs but also make a small profit as well.

If you’ve got big items like a fridge, a freezer or a washing machine that no longer works don’t drag it off to the dump. Look around your area for a scrap metal dealer … you might find that he’s more that willing to take it away for you at no cost whatsoever.

So if you think that recycling the big items is a real drama then perhaps think again. Take a little while to look around and you’re sure to find people who are prepared to take your old cell phones and old appliances and recycle them and that will take all the drama out of recycling for you and for the planet.

It’s interesting to listen to some of the arguments put up by the coal lobby as to why it’s not a good time to invest a lot of money in alternative energy sources.

You will hear them say that it will cost jobs if we turn away from coal based power and in the current financial crisis the very last thing you want to do is lose more jobs. There’ll also be job losses in the transport industry and in the power generation industry if we invest in alternative sources of energy and we really can’t afford to lose jobs in those areas either.

You’ll also hear them say that investing money in alternative energy sources is just a waste when we have so much coal just waiting to be mined … and we really can’t afford to waste money right now either. In fact if we invest in developing alternative energy sources we will be burdening our children with debt that they will still be repaying long after you and I have gone.

It’s sad that somewhere along the way we have lost the ability to tell a story like it really is. Instead we employ spin doctors to put out propaganda that will tug at your hearts … and at your wallets too. They tell you that there will be job losses and there will be debt that will burden our children but that’s only telling half the story … that’s only putting their side of the argument.

It’s almost dishonest because it’s denying that there could possibly be another side to the argument … a side that is just as relevant, and perhaps even more positive, than the propaganda that they would have us believe.

You see there are two sides to the alternative energy debate. There is the point of view put by the coal miners and the power generating companies and the companies that transport the coal and there’s the other point of view … the point of view that suggests that there will be jobs in the alternative energy sector and that may more than compensate for the loss of jobs in the coal mining sector.

In late 2008 the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts prepared a report in research that they had conducted that looked what the short-term impact on jobs would be if America made a positive move towards becoming dependant on alternative energy sources.

It makes surprising reading for instead of losing jobs as the coal lobby wants you to believe, a move to alternative energy sources would actually lead to the creation of more jobs and a bigger percentage of those jobs would be high-paying jobs than what we have now. That kind of puts a different perspective on the cry from the coal industry that people would lose their jobs doesn’t it?

Sure in the very short-term there may be a loss of jobs in the coal industry if we moved to alternative energy sources but that slack would be taken up very quickly by the demand for tradesmen and workers in the alternative energy field. Undoubtedly that short period of job loss would create problems for those people who lost their jobs … I’m certainly not denying that … but what’s the alternative?

Do we keep people working in jobs in a dirty industry that is definitely not eco-friendly or do we help them transition into better paying jobs in a clean, green and environmentally friendly industry?

And of course money is in short supply right now. It’s very difficult for businesses of any size to go out and borrow money in the market place today so it won’t be easy to invest in renewable energy solutions for business. I’m certainly not denying that either but … and it’s a big but … the government is looking at ways of getting the economy moving again and Uncle Sam is very interested in lending money to businesses that are working in the alternative energy sector.

But why do we need to do it right now? Simply because right now we have a window of opportunity that hasn’t existed before … right now we know that the planet is in trouble and if we don’t become eco-friendly the planet is ultimately going to die. Right now we have the need to generate jobs and give industries a boost and what better set of industries to help up than the alternative energy industries.

Unfortunately it’s likely to be a very small window of opportunity and it’s one that the coal industry and their friends are going to try and close as quickly as they can. That’s something that we can’t let happen because if we do it won’t be debt that we’re leaving our children … it will be a dying planet and none of us would want to leave that legacy to our kids do we?

I sometimes think that I must have a very simplistic view of the world because I am left totally bemused that anyone in their right … or wrong … mind would ever want to oppose any reasonable climate change bill that went to Congress.

I mean it really is a no-brainer, the climate is changing and we should be doing everything in our power to live a more environmentally friendly lifestyle so as to slow and halt that climate change. If we don’t do anything positive to make those changes and we continue along the path we’re heading now we are going to destroy the planet as we know it.

So why do we have people in Congress who want to oppose every piece of positive climate change legislation that gets introduced there? And we can’t even say that the opposition to environmentally friendly legislation comes entirely from the Republicans or the Democrats because it doesn’t.

There are members on both sides of both houses who can’t seem to understand that they’re not helping their constituents by opposing climate change legislation. Instead they’re condemning their voters’ descendants to a future that is bleak and inhospitable.

Despite that they go on opposing each piece of legislation and refusing to support anything unless they have squeezed every last drop of compromise out of the sponsors who have brought the legislation into the house. Sometimes there’s so much compromise that you have to wonder if the legislation has any teeth left at all.

But wait, there’s more compromising to come because once the Bill has been passed by the House it has to go to the Senate where all that compromising starts all over again. There are trade-offs and more trade-offs and you can be sure that the climate change skeptics are going to fight tooth and nail to get every concession they can get.

To be fair all this compromising and ignorant opposition to the facts of climate change isn’t just limited to the United States. You’ll find it happening in Australia where the passing of a carbon emissions trading scheme is being blocked by just one Senator. And it’s happening across Europe and in Great Britain, Canada and just about anywhere there’s a democracy.

About the only places that there’s no opposition to climate change legislation is in those small Pacific Island nations where the water level is rising and before too many more years have passed there won’t be any dry land left.

Of course as the climate changes it’s not just the level of the oceans that are changing. We’re seeing the destruction of entire species of plants and animals and in some ways it’s rather ironic that Kermit the Frog found years ago that it wasn’t easy being green because frogs all over the world are one of the species that climate change is having a major impact on.

So before we all become like the frogs … endangered, not green … we need to start doing something positive to combat the overwhelming ignorance of those who want to oppose climate change legislation and who want to tell us that we don’t have to be environmentally friendly because there’s nothing wrong with the planet.

Every one of us … no matter where we live or where we stand in society … needs to get out there and take the fight to become environmentally friendly up to those skeptics and make them listen We need to protest to all levels of government and demand that our elected representatives stop amending important climate change Bills.

We need to make them understand that if they want their jobs back after the next election they better start listening to what we, the people want, and not what the big business lobbyists want for their clients.

We need to challenge them to defend their rejection of the realities of climate change … we need to make them justify their decisions to turn hard-hitting environmentally friendly Bills into vague, wishy-washy pieces of verbiage that sound wonderful but deliver nothing and we need to do it now!

The climate of Planet Earth is changing and we’ve got nowhere else to go when it fails so we need to make those in power hear our voices and change their way of thinking. So why aren’t you calling your representative on your town council right now and ask him or her what they are doing about making your town more environmentally friendly?

Why aren’t you calling, writing and emailing your representative in Congress and your Senator and asking them what positive steps they’re taking to protect the environment?

Why aren’t you inviting your representatives at the state and national level to come to meetings and tell the concerned citizens of your neighborhood why they’re not doing more to protect you from the effects of climate change?

Why aren’t you raising hell to get your message across to those guys who want to pretend that nothing is going to happen despite the fact that the climate is changing?

Right now it’s only the frogs who are saying that it’s not easy being green but if we don’t make a change it will soon be us saying that it’s not easy being human and when that happens it will be all too late.