Gridirony

Gridirony

With all the low-key modesty and small-scale unostentatiousness on display at that little football contest they staged in Detroit a couple days ago [he typed sarcastically], perhaps the last thing you´d expect to find written about the game would be anything having to do with environmental responsibility.

So here, Inbox faithful, is exactly that: the last thing you´d expect to find, courtesy of GreenBiz.com. It says here, among other things, that this year´s game constituted the second consecutive "carbon-neutral" Super Bowl, meaning basically that the NFL helped plant a whole buncha trees in the host city -- 2,400 this year in Motown.

On the flip side of the commemorative coin, we have this story from the Philadelphia Daily News titled "Big Loser On Super Bowl Sunday? The Environment." (In addition to its well-worn City of Brotherly Love nickname, Philly -- as noted in this column on other occasions -- has been hard at work earning a newer moniker, City of Recycling? Oh Brother, What An Ever-Loving Pain In The ...)

The article profiles Philadelphia streets commissioner Clarena Tolson, a tireless recycling advocate, and her annual uphill effort to dissuade revelers from chucking all the packaging and other recyclable dregs from their Super Gluttony Party blowouts into landfill-destined containers.

As Tolson notes in the story, "Super Bowl Sunday ranks right up there with Christmas, July 4 and Labor Day in tonnage [of trash] accumulated after a day of copious drinking and nonstop gorging."

Whew. I think I may have to stop at the drugstore to pick up a bottle of Maalox on the way home tonight.

Hammering Away: Next up we have a zero-waste tale that was e-mailed to me by Ken Carman, who runs West Side P.B.R.R., a nonprofit community-beautification group in Dayton, Ohio, the Official Hometown of Inbox. Take it away, Ken.

When I moved into my present home (summer 2004), I noticed one of my neighbors was always out walking the streets picking up aluminum cans. Wanting to reward and encourage her efforts, I began giving her all of the cans I collected (primarily from litter cleanups I did). Well, to show her appreciation, she began picking up glass and plastic as well, which I would pick up from her house. I began to tell her about other things she could recycle and how to do it most efficiently, and before long I was picking up an occasional bag of tin cans, plastic grocery sacks, and even kitchen waste in a bread bag.

Later I discovered that she was carting all of her aluminum cans to her basement and crushing them with a sledgehammer. This concerned me no small bit, so I asked her how much she earned for her cans, and we determined that she averaged about $10 a week. I told her I would pay her $10 a week and simply take the cans off of her hands (she no longer has to crush or haul them to the recycle center). She continues to collect recyclable litter in the amount of at least one full garbage container per week, and aluminum cans as well.

She has not had to take her city-supplied trash can to the alley for over six months (to my best recollection), generating zero waste at her residence. The kicker of this is she will be 93 years young this spring.

One Small Laugh For Inbox-kind: Headline of the Day goes to this story from CNN.com having to do with an experiment conducted by Russian astronauts at the international space station. They essentially stuck a radio inside an old spacesuit and shoved it out into space, where, for about 90 hours or however long the radio´s batteries held out, the suit was expected to act as a satellite transmitting signals to ham radios and police scanners back home. (Eventually the spacesuit will be sucked into Earth´s atmosphere and incinerated.) The title: "One small step for trash is giant leap for ham-kind."

It´s not every day you get to use a word like ham-kind.

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.