how are things in your area in that respect
well um
starting with my work um we're in a uh aluminum can and paper recycling um i work for TI and there's a uh a lot of paper that gets thrown away here so we've started recycling our uh plain white paper
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and we have a a company that collects it and takes care of that that for us uh in the community um Baltimore County that i that's the county i used to live in
um they just started experimenting with uh trash pickup where uh one day a week they pick up recycled items and then another day a week they pick up
the other trash and uh they've uh contracted with a company here that has a special truck that has different containers on the same truck you know one that holds paper one that holds plastic one that holds tin one that holds aluminum
and uh so they've they've started experimenting with doing it um on a very large scale also in Baltimore City they've started doing it uh there's been a lot of awareness um
especially here on the east coast because our landfills are you know so filled now that uh there's just not enough room for all the garbage that we uh that we create
i think we've all heard about the train load from New Jersey that couldn't find a place to dump or something
that's right and the barge from New York that went around the world and
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until the garbage all rotted or something
we uh our town is just five thousand people and i've been very discouraged by the local authorities dragging their heals about getting into a recycling program each
politician who comes up from election promises that that's going to be real high on his list of priorities but it just doesn't seem to be working out that way
uh one of our local city council members who happens to be a personal friend of ours made the statement the other day that there would always be landfills and we just sort of came unglued at that point because if that's their thinking
then i think we're definitely in trouble here
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because there just cannot always be landfills uh my
we have always saved aluminum just absolutely forever and uh i'm saving uh paper now and glass our biggest problem is that no one will take the paper
it gets really difficult to find someone in fact now i'm donating it to a local church
and by giving it to them they take it in mass and then our junk dealer gives them ten dollars just because they've they're a church and he writes it off as a donation but it's a real problem with
with the paper to find that outlet for it after you've got it stacked up
yeah that's uh it's been a problem that i've noticed a lot in print that uh um once you have collected this
what do you do with it because there's not a whole lot of companies that are taking it there's a lot of people that want to participate and given the facilities will participate and they've proven that time and time again
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and uh i was just reading some figures this morning that seventy nine percent of the people polled considered themselves to be environmentalists
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and so uh you know it looks like there's a lot of people there who want to do it there's just not a lot of companies out there that know what to do with it another problem that that's uh is plastic milk cartons
um
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they've got a way to recycle them they've got places that can recycle them into products no problem the problem is that they can't there's no facility to get it from the people that have the raw material the empty milk cartons
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back to the guy who can do something with it
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and uh in order for this company to survive they've had to uh in their area start sponsoring their own recycling centers
uh
in order to get the raw goods but they you know of course they can they're limited with what they can do they can only do so much and uh
sure
you know it's it's a matter of i i don't think you know i hate to get government involved with anything because it always costs more money but um you know it's a matter of they're going to have to pass stricter laws or start making
i know i know
um
the garbage collection um more costly
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and once they do that then people will be more interested right now it doesn't matter how much garbage you put out to the road it's a flat fee a month
right
if they started billing people by the pound things might change drastically
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as far as well that's one way to force them to recycle is that if they bill them by the pound then they're going to save it and not not put it out to the trash
that's right
uh it we are in an open rural community and we find more garbage on the roadsides when it starts costing people they simply take a bag and pitch
pitch it into a ditch someplace uh my my biggest concern or one of my biggest concerns is is the tires what they're going to ever do with used tires my husband uh recently retired after thirty two years in a service station and of course
yeah
originally it was no big deal you could get rid of them but now there's just simply no way to get rid of these things and you see more and more of that around about the country where people have have thrown a tire in the ditch or two tires in the ditch and
well actually there's a gentleman down in Atlanta who has invented a process using a certain acid and he can take a tire and turn it into immediately burnable oil
will the will the EPA allow this
it has less sulfur in it than processed fuel oil for the house
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it does nothing to hurt the environment and the heat generated by the process is in turn used to run the machine so it's self-sufficient
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and very efficient i mean it it control you know it it controls its own process it burns it reduces the amount of fuel that's required in order to
get out the fuel at the other end um so far they've demonstrated it on a uh garage size unit that this guy invented they're currently looking for funding to build a larger scale and i saw this about three months ago
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uh-hum
a lot of these things can be placed in your area because of the density in population and yet they would be just frightfully expensive to put in our area because of the scarcity of population
well if you think about it if um uh i remember that when they used to take uh they used to pay you to take the tire you know get the turn in your tire when you got your
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and your your husband probably remembers that better than i do i remember there was a time when they'd give you one or two dollars for your used tire now they charge you two dollars for your used tire
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right well he was at the point where if if the customer did not want to take the tire with them he charged them a dollar to dispose of them and still there wasn't really a way to dispose of them this was just to sort of encourage them to take them
uh at one time uh not too long ago uh farmers could use uh tires to start a fire burning fence rows which of course was an air pollutant and they've put a stop to any open burning of any kind and they are fining
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yeah
people now i mean it used to be the law was and no one enforced it but they are enforcing it now and and i'm glad they are however one solution presents another problem
well i would like certainly like to see this you know if this is true with this fellow in Atlanta it sounds wonderful
yes
i saw it on the evening news and um the guy actually took the oil that came out from the process in a measuring cup turned around and poured it right back into the uh tank
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that he was using to fire the process in order to run it
hum
and you actually um with this process by putting in the tires end up with more energy from the oil
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than you put into the process so it's a way of of making a profit off the tires
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and when you stop and look at the you know something like eight million tires a month that are you know discarded you know there's a lot of tires out there that that could go through this process
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well i you've certainly hit on the key to any of it whatever we're going to do there has to be a profit there doesn't there the fellow who recycles the paper and the plastic and the aluminum he's got to be able to make a profit or he just isn't going to do it
there's not a profit
i think the the problem is that there's there's always a payoff to recycling but it's hard for people to see it
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because it's hard for them it's hard to explain to someone that look it's costing us you know umpteen thousand dollars a year to bury this stuff in the ground
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and then what is the long-term effect of us burying that in the ground if that stuff
it's costing us a lot more than money isn't it
yeah it it's going to leak into our water and then we're going to have problems with our water and then it's going to cause health problems and so there is a long-term
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effect and when you stop and think about it every just about every single thing that's produced can be recycled
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i mean if it's if it's uh food you know if it's stuff you scraped off your plate it can go into the compost and you know and so it's i mean
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it there's a way to recycle everything and and um if your husband just retired then i've got to believe that you've got to be old enough to remember that back during the wars hey recycling was the thing to do i mean you didn't
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we didn't throw away anything did we
that's right if you if you didn't recycle you were un-American and and that was the bottom line
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well we have to come to that now that's all there is to it you do see a lot of positive things uh i saw a printout sheet the other day that i'm going to to copy and take to the girls at sorority
