Posts Tagged “recycling”

Until the phone carriers and MBTA collude to spoil it, my daily subway commute is the only time that I’m completely unavailable to the outside world. No phone calls, no email, no social networks. At only three stops, the journey is too brief to really get into a novel or do serious work, so I’m happy when I find an abandoned newspaper on a seat, usually one of those free papers designed to be read in the span of a typical commute.

Why don’t I just take one of those papers from the box or the people handing them out? Well, that’s where it gets complicated. I don’t want to take a paper because I know I’m going to use it only ever so briefly and then I’ll feel responsible for either leaving it behind - arguably littering - or recycling it right away - which seems wasteful. Throwing it in the trash or using it in some art project don’t even make the list.

The free paper publishers know that litter is a big issue - they are banned for distributing on MBTA property and made a donation of hundreds of recycling bins (bags, really) to try and appease the transit people. So back to my eco-neurotic quandary: Is it littering to leave a newspaper on the subway so that others might read it, and does it make a difference if you originally picked up that paper or just found it on the seat?

If lots of people regularly left free papers on the seats, maybe some people would stop taking papers and the total amount of paper would go down. But if nobody ever took those papers off the train, there would be an awful lot of litter at the end of the day. Like a car that loses value when you drive it off the lot, a daily newspaper gets worthless fast.

I’m sure the law is clear: leaving stuff on the T, even nice clean stuff, even leaving it on the seat, is still littering. I’d also say that once you pick something up, you’re responsible for it, so leaving found stuff is littering again. But I still recoil at the waste of reading matter. Like many people (of the Book) I have a hard time throwing away or defacing books.

So here’s my wacky utopian proposal for the morning commute and reading time:

• If you were born on an even numbered day, you take papers on even numbered days, odd birthdays, odd paper days, and you leave those papers on the seat when you get off the train
• If its not your odd/even day, you pick up a left paper and are responsible for taking it off the train and recycling it
• After the main morning commute time, say 9:30am, alternate rules are off and any everybody is responsible for taking papers off the train

If everybody did this, we’d use only half as much paper for disposable free morning reading.  Fat chance of that.  The free paper people certainly don’t want to cut their circulation in half, and typical Americans aren’ t going to be interested in second-hand papers.

So until everybody switches to a more ecologically sound morning read, I will continue to be quietly grateful for minor littering, and will do my best to take my found paper with me on both odd and even days.

I’ve been critical of Whole Foods management in the past, but don’t get me wrong, I’m a loyal customer, and its in that spirit that I offer some free advice on bags. Like many markets, Whole Foods is wisely encouraging shoppers to bring their own bags. The display below is hawking 99 cent bags made from 80% recycled plastic. And if you use these bags - or any others that you bring - you save 5 cents per bag at the checkout. Markets stand to save a lot of money by reducing their need for buying and stocking paper and plastic bags.

Does this plan go too far? Au contraire, this plan doesn’t go too far enough! [nod to Futurama episode 7 in season 2] Whole Foods is the sort of place where you can pay $7.99 for a single fancy lemon. I just don’t see 5 cents as changing behavior in anybody who’s not already predisposed to this sort of ecofriendliness. Does the 5 cent container deposit change a lot of behavior for the busy soccer mom?

Also, I think WF has got their carrots and sticks mixed up here. A 5 cent reward for bringing your own bag is measly, and it means that people who are oblivious to the existence of the rebate still think that bags are free. They should charge people for each bag they use, as is done in many other countries., and it should be a price high enough to make people think.

I’m not going to get into the paper vs plastic thing, let’s just call a bag a bag for now. Let’s recap my modest proposal: Sell reusable bags as they already do, and charge customers a fee for each disposable bag that the market provides. I don’t mean sell a paper/plastic bag for $x, but rather, I mean that WF should collect a fee of some sort, like the bottle deposit or the environmental fees charged by your mechanic for disposal of tires and used motor oil. This is not a profit center, this is an attempt to change consumer behavior for the good of the environment.

So, what’s the right price? I’m saying that 5 cents is not enough, and WF has set the upper bound at $0.99 by selling reusable bags for that much. I’m inclined to the higher end of the scale. Even a buck a bag might not change a lot of rich folks ways, but at least it would raise a bunch of money for carbon offsets or recycling or something. And I don’t think there’s much risk of WF losing customers since price is hardly a differentiator for Whole Foods, but eco-friendliness is. Setting the price of a disposable bag equal to that of a reusable one certainly makes the point, doesn’t it?

It’s a critical part of my thesis that WF customers are not very price sensitive, but of course that’s a sweeping generalization. Some are very very price sensitive, and some will be just plain offended by my pay per bag plan. I can foresee some difficulty at the bagging station for these customers, as the increased price of bagging could lead to some dangerous over stuffing or a reluctance to double bag when needed. I would hate to see arguments break out between beleaguered baggers and cost-conscious customers. We could moderate my harsh regime with one free bag per transaction or perhaps a “bag tax” of some percentage of the grocery bill for all the bags you want.

Speaking as someone who just bought $75 worth of groceries at Whole Foods and got it all in one paper bag, I’m ready and willing to crunch the numbers on this one.