Trashy News

Sunday evening Kari and I went on a brief cycle ride around and about our neighborhood and on some of the more ‘back’ roads in order for me to pick up some aluminum cans. That’s right, cans. I’m on an ‘aluminum can kick’, especially after finding out that they are selling for approx. 74 cents per pound. It takes around 26 cans to make a pound. You do the math.

Needless to say, during our journey we found and saw more than just cans, or should I say, more than just –beer cans-. Initially, after seeing cans and bottles and other crap littering the sides of our roads, we thought we might pick up the litter too, but we soon came to find out how ill equipped we were for such a task and decided to stick to just cans.

We’ve suddenly become extremely aware of how incredibly polluted our environment is while I’ve been on this ‘can kick’. It has started rubbing off on Kari, now as we drive to destination A, we both can’t help but acknowledge how many cans are on the side of the road, along with all of the other crap. Did you know that for each pound of aluminum recovered, Americans save the energy resources to generate about 7.5 Kilowatt-hours of electricity? That’s enough energy to meet the electric needs of a city the size of Pittsburgh, PA for six years. But HERE, don’t take my word for it.

‘Why is the litter situation in itself so bad?’ we ask ourselves, what makes people so uncaring? I try not to think about it anymore, it just makes my head hurt. Maybe it’s the lack of education? I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, “Stupid people litter, smart people fine you for it.” Or it was something to that effect. It really makes me want to station a couple of video cameras so as to catch the fools in the act, although it probably wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law for some reason…I guess I’ll stick to picking up cans, unless I run across some homeless person doing the same thing. Perhaps one day I'll even start picking up the litter...I might make it 10 feet down a road a night.