Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Sunday, March 1, 2009

I’ve never met an aluminum can that I don’t like and don’t pick up off a sidewalk or street or even (much to my son Henry’s chagrin) a trash can.

Yesterday, after Henry and I had finished our afternoon swim at the local community center and were walking from the pool area toward our respective changing rooms, I took a swig of water from the fountain and glanced over to the adjacent trash can. Sure enough, beckoning me was a Diet Dr. Pepper can, bent into a butterfly shape with a dismissive crunch in the middle. I retrieved it and emptied its contents into the fountain.

“Mooooom,” Henry said, expressing his displeasure with my unconventional behavior. Solid citizens, middle-class matrons like his mother, weren’t supposed to go pawing about in the trash. In our culture, trash is the Great Unmentionable, something we don’t concern ourselves with, better kept hidden from view.

I decided to put an end to his mild protest by trotting out technical information. “Do you realize how much embodied energy exists in every aluminum can that ends up in the landfill?” I started.

He gave me the “I don’t know and I don’t really want to know” look. His face carried an air of resignation, like “I’m really not going to win this argument,” so let’s move onto a subject on which I can gain more traction. He studied my face, taking a measure of my mood and asked if I’d spring for a pack of crackers.

For a nano-second, I considered. Why buy nabs from a snack machine when we have healthful offerings at home? Then I remembered how hard he had swum. To me, it was nothing less than a miracle in Mayberry. Yes, I’d “forced” him to take swimming lessons, and had caught all sorts of grief for it over the years. But yesterday, seeing Henry glide effortlessly down the lane, seeing how he not only kept up with me length for length, but bested me, my heart danced for joy. Why, good heavens, he even swam over to coach me. “There’s not enough variation in your workout, Mom,” he said with authority. This sudden development made all the earlier squawking protests worth it. Like the ugly duckling, almost overnight, Henry had emerged into a graceful, confident swimmer.

I forked over a crisp dollar bill. I had my can. He had his nabs. We were both happy.

Out we walked to the car in the lot. I have in my car trunk a box where I stow a compact umbrella, a magazine (on the off chance I were stuck somewhere), a cleaning cloth, aluminum cans and other recyclables I pick up in my meanderings. Sometimes I pull plastic water and power drink bottles from the trash. The other day on my walk around the block in my neighborhood, I stumbled onto a miniature glass vodka bottle in the street (the kind you see in fancy hotel minibars). Into my recycling bin it went. But aluminum cans are my favorites. They’re the low-hanging fruit in the campaign to reduce, reuse and recycle. Lightweight aluminum is easily recyclable, a valuable metal that has no business clogging our nation’s landfills. And you can even make a few dollars by bringing a full load to the scrap metal center.

So, I tell Henry, I never met an aluminum can I don’t like. Unless, of course, it’s summertime and hornets are buzzing out of it. A measure of our nation’s extravagance and carelessness is in how we throw such treasures away. We can all dig (metaphorically speaking) into what we throw away. We can all reduce our personal waste stream; we can all do better.