My eye glasses are misplaced a lot, and sometimes never found because I love being outside in our amazing yard and enjoy doing what needs to be done. They are prescription reading glasses with a string that goes around my neck so why take them off, you tell me. I almost hate plastic, I say almost because I will not hate anything, a desperate disliking yes but no hate. Plastic water bottles of years old are still refilled with water out of the kitchen tap and why not? Just looking around my life I see this element at a glance everywhere. Is this computer keyboard plastic? At 82 years of age, and that is using the first moment of gestation as my starting not my birth, which was 9-15-1941, the garden was my summer haunt pulling weeds and eating fresh pea's. Much could be added here and now but you get the point. Thanks Garrison.
I clicked on your latest post that arrived in my email this morning and read it in amazement as I sat on the edge of my bed in an old farmhouse in Ohio. I am still sitting on the edge of the bed-- haven’t moved to open the curtains yet-- and I’m pecking out my comment with one finger on my iPhone so I can respond to your piece about plastic.
BRAVO! It’s high time for people to wake up to the reality of what we’re doing to the environment and to ourselves with plastic. Thank you for using your platform to spread the word!
Like many things in modern life, plastics are a double edged sword. It is easy to say how evil plastics are given the emergence of science that says they are everywhere on earth, and some forms may be pretty toxic. And of course, we should be recycling a lot more than we do. However, plastics provide some of the miracles of modern life. Ever notice the prevalence of plastics in a modern hospital or dentists office? Or how plastics have reduced the weight of vehicles while also making them safer? If you look around you will see that there are many ways in which plastics have made our lives much better (and I am not talking about a plastic spork!!). And what's cool about most plastics made from petroleum, is that we can use natural feedstocks, such as cellulose from wood or starch from corn, to make them!
I wish that some chemist would invent an adhesive that would make it easier to remove the labels from plastic bottles. I spend a lot of time soaking them in water and peeling off the paper labels so I can recycle the bottles. A few companies have labels that can be peeled off easily in one piece, but most of them are difficult to remove.
Kudos to you for taking the time to make something more recyclable!!
Having worked in the Pulp and Paper Industry, I learned that cleaner recycling inputs leads to a more efficient recycling process that produces a higher quality product. And efforts like you took increases the quality of the recycle stream!!
I get the feeling that plastic recycling is in its technological infancy. But hopefully the industry will respond to pressures to get higher post-consumer recycling rates.
Gee, Whiz, Michele! I had no idea! You're talking about non-refundable bottles, I take it. If there's a 5 cent return for the item, I collect and collect and collect! Right now I don't have a car, but when I do, I can travel a circuit of large apartment houses, and parks , and rest stops on superhighways, etc. When things are going well, I can make about $1/day - maybe $#30 per month here in Central New York. When I lived in the Los Angeles area, I made easily twice as much. The recycling companies compact the aluminum into bales and send them off to Korea, China or Japan for reconversion into cans.
Well, I'm talking about aluminum, a nice, durable metal that can be reused again and again. I imagine plastics get melted down and reshaped into similar containers once again, but I'm not so sure of that. But there's always lots of plastic that doesn't have a recycling value. I think I'll follow your lead, and begin soaking the paper labels off, too! Thanks for the HEADS UP!
Well now, aren’t we all becoming aware of the mess we’re leaving behind for the grandkids. Our own kids are just as bad as we are, just a bit annoyed they didn’t grow up in our generation that had a lot more mindless fun. For them, poor buggers, cigarettes were already identified as bad for your health, there was now a possibility of dying from having unprotected sex, cars were castrated by emission controls, and Elvis had died. What a rotten deal. But it is our grand kids who will silently come to us in the night and rightly smother our collective Godzilla, destroyers of God’s creation.
"And when I have said what I have to say, I stop." Therein lies the plug of verbal plastic...the booming and gesturing that leads nowhere and holds nothing at all. T.S. Eliot captured it all with his: "All shall be well and all the manner of thing shall be well." Sadly, manner is gone and we all are a long way from "well" when we dance at a wedding in our torn-up jeans and and a brain unknown to all. There is no still-point. Only the beat that no one knows.
I too lost my glasses, took your advice and began searching for our ironing board. Sadly, my wife has been downsizing and donated it last week to the Good Will. All for the best though. Its footing was made of plastic. I found my glasses, BTW. They were in the ice box.
In 2014 there was an episode of “America ReFramed” on PBS called “Divide in Concord” (The name of the town and the word “conquered” are pronounced exactly the same – it’s often mispronounced), which was the story of an elderly woman who wanted to ban the sale of single-serve plastic water bottles in the town for environmental reasons. My two brothers, who ran a family supermarket in the town at the time that the video was being filmed, supported her cause and stopped selling small bottles of water. One of my brothers even appears briefly in the film!
It is available on Prime Video and AppleTV, but there is preview at this URL:
Every single person who focuses on today and refuses to envision the future is complicit in abetting that "arid uninhabitable plasticized earth" that awaits their grandchildren.
It’s true. I do love you. You have been making me think and laugh for many decades. I can give no higher praise and have never sought higher except to be called kind. The whole sonnet deserves a place in your essay, perhaps engraved in plastic.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
If you wanted to take a glimpse back to “The Good Old Days," you could find a friend who has some rural relatives in the Ukraine in the twenty-first century! I visited my Pentecostal Ukrainian pastor’s families in “The Homeland” a little over a decade ago. It could have been “Grandma’s farm!” They didn’t even have waxed paper there! There was a large oven built of stone in which you fed the fire in the bottom level, and used a long-handled flat shovel-like device to put the food in and pull it out. Think of a pizza parlor device. When there were left-overs, the lady of the house would run them through the oven for a bit, then feed them to the pig. For storage, there was a deep well-like place where vegetables would be sacked in cloth and set down into the earth, since it was a little cooler there. “Gardens nurtured by manure” – Of Course! When it came to carrying milk, the milk cans were the large tin variety. What your family didn’t drink would be taken over to the Collective Farm and you’d be given a certain amount of credit that could be applied to other things. The “bathroom” would be an outhouse. The family would move the location when the contents became too close to the seat. For a visitor, “midnight trips” could be an experience in daring!
I wasn’t very popular in the Collective Farm that I visited. When the other folks heard that I was a visitor from America, they decided I was semi-taboo! Way back when the Nazis invaded the Ukraine in World War I, the Germans brought in truckloads of sacked potatoes from Colorado. It just so happened that in those years, there had been an insect blight in the mountainous foothills. The bugs discovered the potato and converted to that source as it’s favorite food. The Colorado farmers decided to dump those potatoes on German purchasers during the war. The infected potatoes were then trucked in, all over the Ukraine, and into invaded areas of Russia too. Those farmers tried to control the blight by picking the bugs off the potato leaves and dunking them into bottles holding gasoline. It was a worrying, exasperating process, and one that was only semi-successful. The Colorado Potato Bug had established itself in certain parts of the Ukraine and Soviet Union permanently. It was just my luck! Whenever my hosts weren‘t there beside me, the locals would shun me – emphatically! “Colorato!” they’d sneer.
So, here we are in this modern world, and we have a “Plastic Plague!” instead of a “Potato Bug Plague!” And, yes! I’ve heard that there are areas in the Pacific Ocean, somewhere off of Indonesia, probably other places too, where plastics just naturally gather. The locals gather them up by the ship full - but then, what can they do with them? I read that years ago they used to take the all-metallic ships out to sea and burn the plastics. But that caused a different set of environmental problems - heavy air pollution. I wonder what future generations will think of our plastics?
By the way, I guess I’m being “dense”, but I wonder how “taking public transportation” would relieve some of the problems with plastic? And – in New York City, going underground and taking subway trains might be a good alternative. But what about those of us who are stuck in our suburbs and rural areas, using surface transportation such as cars and trucks? Hmmmm?
Where is the farmer's market in Manhattan? Even more, where are the farms? I live west of the Twin Cities, so do not have to go very far the find a farmer's market. A few miles farther, there are farms. We have salads most every evening, at noon fresh vegetables. At 91, I find good salads a blessing.
I'm one of the freeloaders on the site, and older than you (I got 86ed!), so pay no mind to me. Since I'm doing great physically, I have to wonder if the microplastics in all my parts might be contributing to my resilience. Probably not, but take your comforts where ever you think 'em up, I say.
My eye glasses are misplaced a lot, and sometimes never found because I love being outside in our amazing yard and enjoy doing what needs to be done. They are prescription reading glasses with a string that goes around my neck so why take them off, you tell me. I almost hate plastic, I say almost because I will not hate anything, a desperate disliking yes but no hate. Plastic water bottles of years old are still refilled with water out of the kitchen tap and why not? Just looking around my life I see this element at a glance everywhere. Is this computer keyboard plastic? At 82 years of age, and that is using the first moment of gestation as my starting not my birth, which was 9-15-1941, the garden was my summer haunt pulling weeds and eating fresh pea's. Much could be added here and now but you get the point. Thanks Garrison.
I clicked on your latest post that arrived in my email this morning and read it in amazement as I sat on the edge of my bed in an old farmhouse in Ohio. I am still sitting on the edge of the bed-- haven’t moved to open the curtains yet-- and I’m pecking out my comment with one finger on my iPhone so I can respond to your piece about plastic.
BRAVO! It’s high time for people to wake up to the reality of what we’re doing to the environment and to ourselves with plastic. Thank you for using your platform to spread the word!
Like many things in modern life, plastics are a double edged sword. It is easy to say how evil plastics are given the emergence of science that says they are everywhere on earth, and some forms may be pretty toxic. And of course, we should be recycling a lot more than we do. However, plastics provide some of the miracles of modern life. Ever notice the prevalence of plastics in a modern hospital or dentists office? Or how plastics have reduced the weight of vehicles while also making them safer? If you look around you will see that there are many ways in which plastics have made our lives much better (and I am not talking about a plastic spork!!). And what's cool about most plastics made from petroleum, is that we can use natural feedstocks, such as cellulose from wood or starch from corn, to make them!
I wish that some chemist would invent an adhesive that would make it easier to remove the labels from plastic bottles. I spend a lot of time soaking them in water and peeling off the paper labels so I can recycle the bottles. A few companies have labels that can be peeled off easily in one piece, but most of them are difficult to remove.
Kudos to you for taking the time to make something more recyclable!!
Having worked in the Pulp and Paper Industry, I learned that cleaner recycling inputs leads to a more efficient recycling process that produces a higher quality product. And efforts like you took increases the quality of the recycle stream!!
I get the feeling that plastic recycling is in its technological infancy. But hopefully the industry will respond to pressures to get higher post-consumer recycling rates.
Gee, Whiz, Michele! I had no idea! You're talking about non-refundable bottles, I take it. If there's a 5 cent return for the item, I collect and collect and collect! Right now I don't have a car, but when I do, I can travel a circuit of large apartment houses, and parks , and rest stops on superhighways, etc. When things are going well, I can make about $1/day - maybe $#30 per month here in Central New York. When I lived in the Los Angeles area, I made easily twice as much. The recycling companies compact the aluminum into bales and send them off to Korea, China or Japan for reconversion into cans.
Well, I'm talking about aluminum, a nice, durable metal that can be reused again and again. I imagine plastics get melted down and reshaped into similar containers once again, but I'm not so sure of that. But there's always lots of plastic that doesn't have a recycling value. I think I'll follow your lead, and begin soaking the paper labels off, too! Thanks for the HEADS UP!
I was referring to plastic pill bottles, detergent bottles, food bottles and jars that have a recycling symbol on them.
Plan for the worst. Hope for the best. Other words to live by.
Middleton O'Malley
just now
Well now, aren’t we all becoming aware of the mess we’re leaving behind for the grandkids. Our own kids are just as bad as we are, just a bit annoyed they didn’t grow up in our generation that had a lot more mindless fun. For them, poor buggers, cigarettes were already identified as bad for your health, there was now a possibility of dying from having unprotected sex, cars were castrated by emission controls, and Elvis had died. What a rotten deal. But it is our grand kids who will silently come to us in the night and rightly smother our collective Godzilla, destroyers of God’s creation.
"And when I have said what I have to say, I stop." Therein lies the plug of verbal plastic...the booming and gesturing that leads nowhere and holds nothing at all. T.S. Eliot captured it all with his: "All shall be well and all the manner of thing shall be well." Sadly, manner is gone and we all are a long way from "well" when we dance at a wedding in our torn-up jeans and and a brain unknown to all. There is no still-point. Only the beat that no one knows.
Pray harder.
I too lost my glasses, took your advice and began searching for our ironing board. Sadly, my wife has been downsizing and donated it last week to the Good Will. All for the best though. Its footing was made of plastic. I found my glasses, BTW. They were in the ice box.
In 2014 there was an episode of “America ReFramed” on PBS called “Divide in Concord” (The name of the town and the word “conquered” are pronounced exactly the same – it’s often mispronounced), which was the story of an elderly woman who wanted to ban the sale of single-serve plastic water bottles in the town for environmental reasons. My two brothers, who ran a family supermarket in the town at the time that the video was being filmed, supported her cause and stopped selling small bottles of water. One of my brothers even appears briefly in the film!
It is available on Prime Video and AppleTV, but there is preview at this URL:
https://worldchannel.org/episode/arf-divide-concord/#:~:text=DIVIDE%20IN%20CONCORD%20is%20an,and%20the%20pursuit%20of%20happiness.
And we remember the 1968 Graduate who was told the key to the future: "Plastics."
Every single person who focuses on today and refuses to envision the future is complicit in abetting that "arid uninhabitable plasticized earth" that awaits their grandchildren.
Dear Mr. Keillor,
It’s true. I do love you. You have been making me think and laugh for many decades. I can give no higher praise and have never sought higher except to be called kind. The whole sonnet deserves a place in your essay, perhaps engraved in plastic.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Love,
Dawn
Thanks for the sonnet.
That sonnet is only the Bard’s to give, but this one is mine.
Soulstice
In mourning that the shortest day must die
The Soulstice wraps the weeping world in sleep
And rocking while the crippled hours creep
The Longest Night sets sail across the sky.
He may come howling, bitter, black, and bold.
The Soulstice is the friend of Frost and Gloom
Who goad the buried bulbs to bud and bloom.
He may come softly, silent, bright and cold.
The Longest Night waits patiently for Dawn.
When Day returns and banishes the night
And washes Dawn away with floods of light
He lingers to embrace her ‘til she’s gone.
He sells us visions while he steals our sight.
Beguiling thief, the lonely Longest Night.
If you wanted to take a glimpse back to “The Good Old Days," you could find a friend who has some rural relatives in the Ukraine in the twenty-first century! I visited my Pentecostal Ukrainian pastor’s families in “The Homeland” a little over a decade ago. It could have been “Grandma’s farm!” They didn’t even have waxed paper there! There was a large oven built of stone in which you fed the fire in the bottom level, and used a long-handled flat shovel-like device to put the food in and pull it out. Think of a pizza parlor device. When there were left-overs, the lady of the house would run them through the oven for a bit, then feed them to the pig. For storage, there was a deep well-like place where vegetables would be sacked in cloth and set down into the earth, since it was a little cooler there. “Gardens nurtured by manure” – Of Course! When it came to carrying milk, the milk cans were the large tin variety. What your family didn’t drink would be taken over to the Collective Farm and you’d be given a certain amount of credit that could be applied to other things. The “bathroom” would be an outhouse. The family would move the location when the contents became too close to the seat. For a visitor, “midnight trips” could be an experience in daring!
I wasn’t very popular in the Collective Farm that I visited. When the other folks heard that I was a visitor from America, they decided I was semi-taboo! Way back when the Nazis invaded the Ukraine in World War I, the Germans brought in truckloads of sacked potatoes from Colorado. It just so happened that in those years, there had been an insect blight in the mountainous foothills. The bugs discovered the potato and converted to that source as it’s favorite food. The Colorado farmers decided to dump those potatoes on German purchasers during the war. The infected potatoes were then trucked in, all over the Ukraine, and into invaded areas of Russia too. Those farmers tried to control the blight by picking the bugs off the potato leaves and dunking them into bottles holding gasoline. It was a worrying, exasperating process, and one that was only semi-successful. The Colorado Potato Bug had established itself in certain parts of the Ukraine and Soviet Union permanently. It was just my luck! Whenever my hosts weren‘t there beside me, the locals would shun me – emphatically! “Colorato!” they’d sneer.
So, here we are in this modern world, and we have a “Plastic Plague!” instead of a “Potato Bug Plague!” And, yes! I’ve heard that there are areas in the Pacific Ocean, somewhere off of Indonesia, probably other places too, where plastics just naturally gather. The locals gather them up by the ship full - but then, what can they do with them? I read that years ago they used to take the all-metallic ships out to sea and burn the plastics. But that caused a different set of environmental problems - heavy air pollution. I wonder what future generations will think of our plastics?
By the way, I guess I’m being “dense”, but I wonder how “taking public transportation” would relieve some of the problems with plastic? And – in New York City, going underground and taking subway trains might be a good alternative. But what about those of us who are stuck in our suburbs and rural areas, using surface transportation such as cars and trucks? Hmmmm?
Where is the farmer's market in Manhattan? Even more, where are the farms? I live west of the Twin Cities, so do not have to go very far the find a farmer's market. A few miles farther, there are farms. We have salads most every evening, at noon fresh vegetables. At 91, I find good salads a blessing.
In Italy you can walk and you can go to the store but you cant walk to the store but can go to the store on foot.
You scared me, Garrison. I was worried the well was going dry. Btw, I beat you to 81 on June 21st🤠
I'm one of the freeloaders on the site, and older than you (I got 86ed!), so pay no mind to me. Since I'm doing great physically, I have to wonder if the microplastics in all my parts might be contributing to my resilience. Probably not, but take your comforts where ever you think 'em up, I say.