Published: July 23, 2008 04:19 pm            

Changing times, changing priorities: Recycling, energy costs concern all of us

Only a few years ago the term “recycling” conjured visions of people searching roadside litter for aluminum pop cans they could sell for a little extra bread and milk money. Plastic pop bottles and milk cartons were tossed into the garbage along with cardboard boxes and steel soup cans. Again and again the public was told that recycling just wasn’t flying because it just wasn’t economical. Nobody wanted the old stuff.

Well, the times, they are a’changing.

Monday I joined a tour of Recycle WV, a major recycling enterprise in the Virginian Industrial Park near Princeton. I had seen it from afar, but I never had the time to visit and take a good look; in fact, the last good memory I had of the area was of the fire that gutted several of the old Virginian Railroad buildings.

Monday’s tour didn’t feature gutted brick buildings; instead, they’re now long, single story office spaces awaiting workers who will manage operations as the machinery outside shreds junk automobiles and appliances. Recycle WV is not accepting copper yet, but when it does, sellers will have to present valid driver’s licenses and see their offerings carefully recorded for future reference.

Of course, the most interesting part was watching huge claw cranes grabbing fistfuls of shredded metal and seeing tractors scooting about like little droids out of “Star Wars.” They even have shredders that can cut up cars. I’d love to see that happen.

Maybe a public viewing area where tourists could see the big machines in action is worth thinking about. I remember seeing a similar situation in Tampa, Fla. There’s a big dry-dock along one side of the harbor where big ocean-going freighters are hauled out of the water and serviced. I was told that at night you can see the workers’ acetylene torches as they labored over the steel beasts.

Somebody in Tampa’s government noticed that many restaurants and tourist attractions were on the other side of the harbor, so he wanted the dry-dock hidden from public view because it was “ugly.” Well, the idea outraged the restaurants’ owners. Many of their guests had never seen freighters and thought the yards were fascinating. Cover them up? Don’t you dare!

Across the county in Bluefield, I’m seeing more of my neighbors setting out bags of plastics, cardboard, aluminum cans and newspapers so they can be picked up for recycling. If Humvees were made out of cardboard and plastic, Bluefield’s program would have enough to make more than a dozen of them. Only a few years ago, this was impossible. Nobody was interested in recycling.

There wasn’t much interest in electric cars, either, but now we’re hearing about hybrid cars that use both electricity and gasoline. One local man even found an electric car from the 1970s and restored it. It looks like something you’d give your kids to play with, but the concept is sound enough. The model’s maximum speed is 35 mph, but it’s quiet. Somebody in the newsroom remarked that the quiet’s a good feature–you can hearing the cursing of all the drivers stuck behind you. Future models shouldn’t have that drawback.

The plight of motorists who can’t resort to electricity has become a common topic on the front page. One woman I questioned about rising gasoline prices said she felt like she was working so she could afford to go to work. Another person remarked that soon the price of gas will make stealing it a felony. Other members of the public said they were cutting back impulse buying and taking shorter vacations to save money.

Then there is heating oil. When reporter Charles Owens did a story about heating oil, I’ll confess the idea sounded odd to me. It’s July. Well, it turned that lots of folks are worrying about winter right now.

With fuel prices going up, low income families are wondering how they’re going to stay warm. Some homeowners are looking for coal furnaces and discovering that they are no longer being made. Will entrepreneurs step forward to meet the demand?

The times are changing, and I have a feeling that we’re not going back to the old days of cheap gas and automatically tossing stuff we don’t need anymore. Times are tough now and getting tougher, but we’ve weathered the storms in the past and I’m sure we will do it again.

And we may actually find that life will be better once the storm has passed us by.

Greg Jordan is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph.

Contact him at gjordan@bdtonline.com.

        

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