Too Much Beer

My roommate Jake and I are filling up our "beer wall." We have to place a new bottle on the wall for every new kind of beer we try. Our other roommate doesn't drink and hates looking at it. He wants to start a "juice wall." Jake and I really should slow down though. Each of those bottles came from a six or twelve pack. That doesn't include repeats. Here's a close up to better see the brands:

While Jake and I get fat and stupid from drinking all this beer here are some interesting facts on recycling glass bottles I found from Oberlin College:

• Glass doesn't wear out; it can be recycled indefinitely. For every ton of glass recycled, over a ton of resources are saved: 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.
• Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass.
• States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume.
• Americans toss out enough glass bottles and jars every two weeks to fill up the 1.350-foot towers of the former World Trade Center.
• If all glass bottles and jars recycled in the U.S. in 1994 were laid end to end, they'd stretch to the moon and half way back to earth.

As sophomorically cool as the beer wall appears, it is kind of juvenile. I think once we fill up the wall, we should take everything down to recycling. We'll see.

"Recycling facts." Oberlin College Resource Conservation Team. 2001. Web. 20 November 2010.

Welcome to Recycle UNL

Hello UNL.

This is the inaugural entry in what will hopefully be a regularly occurring blog. So what's the purpose? Why should you be reading this? The goal for this blog is to get everyone reading it to recycle. We all need to recycle anything recycle-able. We'll start small. Newspapers, cans, bottles aren't so bad. Composting sounds unappealing. We'll work our ways up to that.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Does this sound like too much work? It does to me too. But we all have to start recycling if we want to keep our planet livable and sustainable. I firmly believe that someday everyone will recycle nearly everything that we currently throw away. Boxes, wrappers, linings, every kind of container will be recycled. And items that aren't recyclable now will be made that way in the future. I'm just not sure how long it will take to get there. But we all have to start sometime. Let's start sooner rather than later.

Why recycle now? Why does anyone really need to recycle? Why blog about it? The inception comes out of my own laziness and guilt for not recycling. I know I should recycle but I haven't been able to make myself actually do it. When I lived at my parent's house recycling was easy for me. All I had to do was throw my bottle, can, or container into a paper bag and my parents did the rest. They made regular trips to the recycling center and sorted everything for me. When I moved into my own apartment, I vowed to continue their fine example.

I got lazy. I meant to get real recycling containers. Not to diminish paper bags, but they look rather boring. I wanted real containers labeled "glass," "aluminum," and "plastic." I thought that would make me feel all official. Instead, I have this pile of crap sitting in my laundry room corner:

I have no sorting method at all. I just throw stuff in the corner, mostly space consuming cardboard, and hope that I'll get around to recycling it.

My first step toward becoming a good-little recycler is to take all of the crap out of the corner and actually recycling it. Maybe my next step is to get official containers. Maybe that will inspire me. I'll update this blog with research and figures eventually. This is a horrible preliminary post but things will get more coherent with revision, I promise.



So, what will Recycle UNL be exactly? This is going to be a blog that invites you the reader, the fellow UNL student, to recycle. I'll try to get off my own lazy ass and be a good example. It's not a foreign, scary concept. But maybe it is hard to get over our apathy towards it. Let's recycle. We're all in this together.