Waste_Inbox

One of the things that's fascinating about traveling abroad are those sometimes subtle cultural differences that make me better understand being an American, for both good and bad.

It can be how pleasant servers are in restaurants or how much people make eye contact in elevators. On my recent vacation to Amsterdam, one of the things that struck me is the bicycles.

Anyone who's been to the city or the Netherlands in general knows what I'm talking about. The Dutch nation is crazy about cycling. But not in the way Americans think of it. Particularly in Amsterdam, it's the preferred means of transportation. People in business suits use them just as students do.

In America when we think of bikes, we often think about some expensive, state of the art, cool brand-name type vehicle. The bikes of Holland are generic and austere. Many of them have baskets that look like those plastic packing crates. But no, these aren't driven by the homeless, they're driven by smart, well-dressed women using cell phones.

It's a practical approach in a country that's small, flat and one of the most densely populated on earth. It seems like a highly environmental approach as well, and by extension, reflective of a very green country.

But I saw relatively few public recycling bins, common elsewhere in Europe. I didn't see a particularly litter free country. That's borne out by Yale University's 2008 Environmental Performance Index for nations of the world, which had the Netherlands ranked 55th out of 149 countries -- below the United States.

My point with all this is that as we look to improve or at least evaluate our environmental performance, whether in the U.S. or Canada, we have to give enormous weight to our own particular cultural attitudes, tendencies and habits. Whether we ride to work on foot-powered vehicles or SUVs doesn't mean that we are more likely to recycle.

We have to find solutions that work best for our culture. That's not saying we can't change. But our best chance for success is going to be with solutions that make sense for our society, not somebody else's.

Allan Gerlat is editor of Waste & Recycling News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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