Friday Faceoff, Earth Day Edition: Recycling vs.... NOT Recycling

Happy Earth Day, Blogfriends!

Today's Friday Faceoff is another "opinion" piece, cobbled together from readings, experience, anecdotes, and my gut. There are roughly 1bajillion opinions about the pros and cons of recycling. But since it's Earth Day, and we may all be wading through more green-focused media and advertising today than usual, I thought I'd take a crack at it. I'm not an expert, for sure, but I can at least give us some things to ponder.

The Typical "Pro" Recycling Arguments:

• Keeps stuff out of landfills (where plastics and metal, but ALSO paper, will essentially never decompose)  
• Reduces fossil fuel consumption by using already-harvested materials to make new products, rather than, say, cutting down new trees for paper or refining virgin petroleum to make plastic
• The "Wow! Cool!" factor of buying, I don't know, maybe a purse made out of recycled water bottles....
• Sorting through our piles of stuff to put into the recycling raises our awareness of our garbage output
• In some cases, it's cheaper to make new products out of recycled materials

Those are some reasonable "Pros". Keeping stuff out of landfills is a big deal. Let's not underestimate that.

Typical "Con" Recycling Arguments:

• The separate collection, transportation, and sorting burden alone may be enough to off-set any carbon/fossil fuel reduction gained by recycling the materials
• The chemical pollution created by recycling can be as harmful or worse than producing things from virgin materials
• The whole "recycling" industry is controlled by corrupt companies out to make a profit and it's a racket
• Package markings are misleading, and lull us into a sense of do-gooding by believing all our plastic and glass can be recycled, when in reality very little of it can or will be recycled
• There just aren't really that many things that can be practically made out of recycled material (particularly plastic)

I didn't make these things up.  You can read all about them in the book Garbage Land, or read some articles about it here and here and here.

I've been a pretty active paper/glass/aluminum/plastic recycler for a while now. I dutifully carried my Diet Coke cans and recyclable paper home with me to recycle if caught out of recycle-bin range. I rinsed my jars and put them gingerly into the blue bags (Chicago's shameful pretend recycling system of yore) and wished them good luck on their journey to a new life. I imagined that they may be reincarnated as salsa jars or mugs or something pretty.

But every time I drove (yes, DROVE, because Chicago is stupid and neanderthal in its recycling attempts) my recycling to the giant overstuffed dumpsters at the recycling center, I scratched my head and heaved a sigh and wondered if ANY of that ridiculous pile would actually be recycled.  I don't have an answer for you about that quandary.

Overall, it looks like recycling is still worth it. Especially for things like paper, glass, and aluminum/metal.  Through my light research, I've ended up deciding that REDUCING my plastic intake/output is really the best bet for the sticky, polluting, all-around nastiness of plastic. Check out MyPlasticFreeLife for some inspiration about the process of eliminating plastic from your home.

As my wise friend Jackie and I have discussed many times, the "3 Rs" of Greeny-ness go in a certain order for a reason: FIRST Reduce, THEN Reuse, and THEN Recycle. If I can get into the habit of reducing and reusing first, hopefully I will eventually have fewer bags of recycling as well. A good start.

Friday Face-off: WD-40 vs. Olive Oil Spray

This may be a weird way to kick of a "Friday Face-Off" concept, but it is definitely the most timely of my planned mashups. When I started scribbling away at blog ideas, I decided that I wanted to have a chance to pit two different products, ideas, actions, or activities against each other and evaluate the results. I promise that the other ideas I have for the Face-Off are cooler things like "Dishwasher vs. Hand wash your dishes" or "Burts Bees vs. Aubrey Organics lip gloss". But today's Face-Off is straight from my actual life this week, so I thought it was kind of fun.

So what about my week inspired me walk around the apartment with a can of olive oil spray, you may ask? Well, after months of suffering, I suddenly decided yesterday that I had HAD IT with our stupid, squeaky front door. While Les didn't seem to notice the offending noises, I had grown weary of wincing with headache and embarrassment every time he or I opened or closed our door.  Ear-splitting screeches would pierce the tranquil apartment hallway as I tried to sneak in or out before any of my neighbors could barge out of their unit and yell at me.

Whenever something was rusty or squeaky or stuck when I was a kid, my dad would bust out a rusty can of WD-40, point it at the offending object, and miraculously all would be well. But as I was about to write myself a post-it note to buy some WD-40 at the Walgreens on my way home from work, I paused to wonder just what is in that yellow and blue can of magic.

Here's what I could find out about the ingredients list: They won't tell us. It's a "trade secret". Ok, fine. That doesn't mean it's made of baby seal tears and ozone, but it does leave a lot to the imagination. Snopes says that the Material Safety Data Sheet for WD-40 lists its ingredients as primarily petroleum-based. Wonderful. We don't want any more of those in our house.

But then I found a couple of sites that claim that the main ingredient in WD-40 is actually compressed fish oil! Well whaddya know. I have a can of compressed oil in my cabinet already:

Actually, I have the generic Target brand olive oil spray. Whatever. I marched happily to the hinges with my can of non-stick spray and gave our door a good lubing. And I can proudly report that the door now swings silently and smoothly. Without an extra can of stuff, trip to the store, or shelling out any more cashola. Is WD-40 really made of fish oil? I don't care. I'd rather not use fish-based products either.

So in our first Friday Face-Off, I'm going to go with Olive Oil Spray for the WIN!