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Thriller fiction | Non-fiction: Adventure with a Purpose

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You are here: Home / Uncategorized / Recycle to protect West Virginia mountains and streams

Recycle to protect West Virginia mountains and streams

July 31, 2013 By Eric Douglas

I was dropping off my recycling at the Kanawha Country Solid Waste Authority Recycling Center on Slack Street when a man there looked at me and said, wryly, “Saving the world, one plastic bottle at a time.” I took it he realized it was an uphill battle, but it was still important enough to do. I gathered that because he had more cans and bottles than I did.

For a long time, recycling had the stigma as something “tree-huggers” worried about or that it was too impractical to deal with. I honestly think of it in terms of natural resources and being a good steward of our environment—something God tells us we should do.

According to the website GreenWaste.com: “The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.” In my mind, that makes recycling a national security issue. If we didn’t throw all that paper away, would we be closer to energy independent? GreenWaste.com says so. “Aluminum cans account for less than 1% of the total U.S. waste stream, even so, the energy required to replace just the aluminum cans wasted in 2001 was equivalent to 16 million barrels of crude oil, enough to meet the electricity needs of all homes in Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, San Francisco and Seattle.”

Recycling can be a nuisance, but after a while it becomes a habit and you just do it. On vacation a few weeks ago, there was no place to put cans and bottles to recycle them. I had to throw them away and it drove me crazy.

Another way to reduce waste is with reusable shopping bags. I leave mine in the trunk of my car so I always have them. When I was researching my children’s book Sea Turtle Rescue I learned that sea turtles mistake plastic shopping bags for food, eat them, and die. (I know there aren’t any sea turtles in West Virginia, but you would be surprised how far those bags can travel.) If you don’t want to bother with reusable bags, at least take the store bags back to the store and drop them off. They are recyclable, too.

A final tidbit: The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 75 percent of solid waste is recyclable, but only about 30 percent is actually recycled. We do this, but at the same time we complain about landfills. I just read that recycling in Kanawha County has taken off so much in recent months that they have had to hire additional staff to keep up with the demand. That’s fantastic news. I’d love to see them have to hire even more people. I can’t think of a better way to keep people working and protect the beautiful West Virginia hills.

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Real Thugs: A Cult of Murder — Small groups of travelers have disappeared all over the mid-Atlantic without a trace. When bodies turn up with what appear to be ritual markings, FBI Agent AJ West is on the hunt for what might be a serial killer. Or something even more sinister. It’s a race against […]

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