116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
On Topic: Frugality may be a skill we need to relearn
Michael Chevy Castranova
Nov. 23, 2011 4:48 pm
Three piles. In the town we lived in before we moved here, the rules were your recycling needed to be sorted and hauled out to the curb in three separate containers.
Paper, plastic, and glass and metal.
So every Wednesday evening for about 10 years, I'd drag our various recycling receptacles - from the kitchen, our office and the back bedroom where I had my drawing table - into one room to see what was what.
It became a ritual: I'd sit on the floor, to better put items into separate paper bags we'd saved from the grocery store - yes, we took our own canvas bags when we shopped, but we also always made certain we collected some paper bags for recycling.
And thump, thump, thump, in would hop Chloe to do his part.
Chloe always got involved. He'd tear at the crumpled papers, attempting to straighten them, stick his nose into every empty cereal box, peer into each tin can, then rear up on his hind legs to ensure nothing was left in any of the receptacles.
He's a pretty curious rabbit. (And, yes, Chloe's a boy.)
Here in Cedar Rapids the recycling process is a lot simpler, and I don't know if Chloe misses our weekly routine. Now everything except for glass goes into one, large wheeled container.
What's the fun in that?
It was our grandparents and great-grandparents who'd weaved the notion of recycling, reusing and repurposing into valiant tales of adventure and intrepidness.
They collected rain water for bathing. Every inch of space was held accountable - even if only as small as a shoe box latched onto a second-story window ledge for a mini-garden.
Heck, I still tend to call it “tin foil,” even though the stuff's been made from aluminum probably as long as I've been alive. Surely that comes from hearing oh, so many times about how our grandparents and their parents washed used tin foil for a future second use.
During “their” generation - during the Great Depression and two world wars - reuse was not only a necessity, it was promoted to the level of virtue. In some instances, it also seemed somewhat homey.
Look at this excerpt, for example, from a February 1919 edition of Popular Science magazine, that long-running paean - along with its sibling, Popular Mechanics - to do-it-yourself-ness:
Long before the world war taught us economy, among other lessons, there was a saying that a French family could live, and live well, on the waste from a typical American table.
A series of crude bar charts at the bottom of the page depicts how, “if all the waste material collected in the city of Washington (D.C.) were sorted out into its component parts, and the parts set up beside the Washington Monument, … the monument would be the smallest part in the group.”
The article, headlined “Out of the Garbage-Pail into the Fire,” goes on to sing the praises of how “grease” from our garbage was being converted by U.S. companies into fertilizer and into glycerin - the latter to manufacture explosives for the war effort.
Moreover, a Mr. E.L. Culver of Chicago, the story continues, had invented a method to employ everyday household garbage and coal dust in the making of bricks.
It's a pleasant thought that, even if we are careless in the kitchen, we may escape the just punishment for our sins, since in wasting what might have been fuel for our bodies we gain fuel for the furnace.
An accompanying illustration shows the proposed brick factory, appointed with a giant “impregnator” and tireless grinders, conveyors, belts and conduits. Like a flagpole towering above the plant is a massive smokestack, billowing its dark plume as a symbol of its proud work.
In those days, they contemplated - and often celebrated - the reuse of everything, by golly. Popular Science tells of one Californian who, when faced with the dilemma of not owning enough space for both a new garage and a pergola, hit on the idea of creating the wood garden spot on top of his concrete garage.
On the same page is a brief item about a poet who “had this great desire to pass on his weekly creations to an admiring audience, and he hit on an economical way of doing it.” Instead of renting a lecture hall each time he had a new poem to share with the public, this versifier spent $50 to have his “rocky, sloping” front yard “blasted” into a permanent amphitheater.
An accompanying photo shows a patient Sunday crowd gathered for one of his readings. (You can view these old Popular Science pages at http://smgs.us/go5.)
Blowing up our front yards aside, the honesty and rightness of this virtue of reuse is a lesson, I think, we're going to have to learn and relearn. It's an ethic we're probably going to admire once more in the coming days and years.
Our grandparents tried to teach it to us. Even my rabbit sees some enjoyment in it.