In exchange for using Tamanend Park for Scout events, the park asks Playwicki District to support occasional park-wide activities, this weekend’s activity was a clean-up of the Mill Creek that went through the park and 10 of us were there to help.  There were some other groups also helping and they broke into four main groups:

  1. Other Scout units
  2. Church groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses in this case, I think)
  3. A girl’s high school soccer team
  4. Juvenile parolees

The parolees had the blank stare of death in their eyes but the Jehovah’s Witnesses all had excessively long skirts for a creek clean-up.  I’m not sure which I found more unsettling but the most heart-breaking part of the day was the clean-up tallying.  We’d found about 80 plastic bags and 50 plastic drink containers totaling 30 pounds or so and one kid said “yea! We made a difference!”  … sure… considering that through the 70s and 80s the garbage dumped into the Atlantic from the US was measured in the millions of pounds per hour, our difference came out to undoing something on the order of a 1/6th of a second of that waste.  Wooo!   Oh, yeah, this number also assumes that the act of collecting the garbage generated no externalities like the granola bar wrappers we generated and bottled water we drank.

I don’t mind when companies greenwash something, as long as the benefits are tangible to someone.  Hybrids aren’t nearly as environmentally friendly as one would wish, most paper doesn’t biodegrade in nearly the amount of time often stated, and local produce can generate more emissions depending on its location and the competing economies of scale.  My employer switched from polystyrene cups to paper cups for sizes over 8 oz in its cafeteria and the legion failings of paper came out quicky:

  • Paper doesn’t last through as many uses
  • Paper doesn’t insulate as well, making many users consume multiple cups
  • Paper often consumes more production resources

The thing that annoyed me most was that I have a coworker that horded cups.  If a meeting ended and there were extra cups, he’d take them.  He said “one day, the Styrofoam will be gone, and I’ll be ready. *cackle*”  I thought he was just being cheap, bastard was right.