Palmerfest is over; the bands have survived the intermittent rain showers, and by now most of you partygoers have finally cured your daylong hangovers.
It's likely, however, that Palmer Street is not quite back to normal. Beer cans probably still dot lawns and tumble down the street when the wind blows, and stray remnants of responsible party hosts' cop-avoiding yard fences are falling limp.
Cleaning up any party is no easy task, but although cleaning up a whole street is not what anyone would call fun, it's a necessary part of having a block party.
The plethora of beer cans, plastic cups and discarded wooden beer pong tables that make their annual appearance in Athens have convinced me of one thing: it's high time for a lesson in recycling.
Spurred by my own recent re-devotion to recycling (thanks in large part to my uber-responsible roommate who really does save the world in her free time) and encouraged by the positive student response to my save the earth and clean up your litter! column a few weeks ago, I'm convinced that party-going and party-throwing students can do it.
According to Ohio University's Recycling & Refuse Web site, about 40 percent of OU's waste is diverted as recyclables and reusables. This amounts to 2,500 tons of recyclable or reusable waste being diverted out of landfills ' and saves more than $200,000 in waste disposal costs. All these numbers prove what many of us already know: recycling is a good thing.
In fact, according to the Recycling & Refuse folks, recycling just one aluminum can save enough energy to run a television for up to three hours. Based on the sheer amount of cans that OU students dispose of every weekend, we can save a lot of energy if we recycle all those beer-a-mids instead of pitching Hefty bags full of last weekend's revelry into Dumpsters.
Living in Athens, recycling really isn't all that hard. If you don't have a city recycling bin, have no fear ' pre-divided recycling containers are near most Dumpsters Uptown. Dorm-dwellers especially have no excuse not to recycle because there are divided recycling containers outside almost every dorm Dumpster.
I realize that there's been much Fox News-esque debate about whether or not recycling is as beneficial to the environment as most of us assume. Many conservative politicians who are looking to save a few more bucks while they're alive have critiqued and criticized the economic and environmental impact of recycling plants in recent months. Apparently, they think persuading the American public that recycling is evil will do the trick ' even if it does mean that their grandkids could never see a clear blue sky.
As I was musing about what to write about this week, I realized that a column about recycling could easily come off as motherly at worst and slightly preachy at best ' two qualities I try hard to avoid in my weekly rants.
I've firmly decided that there's really no reason not to recycle, even if you're not a self-declared tree hugger. But I couldn't figure out why many students (and non-students) don't do their small part to keep the world around for a few more thousand years.
It all comes down to laziness: students who don't recycle are just too lazy to do so. Students have lots of reasons and lots of justifications for not recycling ' early twenty-somethings become really good at justifying bad behavior and explaining away every accusation that they really aren't perfect. But the core issue is more about many students' general unwillingness to do anything beyond the least amount of effort it takes to get by.
In defense of lots of students who do actually recycle (including one of my good friends, an environmental science major who proudly displays her Recyclers do it more than once! bumper sticker), there are those can-sorting and cardboard-box-flattening students among us who serve as wonderful examples of recycling gurus.
However, these Recyclemaniacs aren't the majority, and the earth could certainly use a few more people in it who care about the kind of environment their kids will be living in.
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Emily Vance
