It's Only a Litte Sorting

I'm re-reading the book Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. It's one of my favorite books, but I haven't read it for many years. For anyone who doesn't know the story, its about the Western States of the United States succeeding to form their own nation 'Ecotopia.' On the back of my copy there's a quote from Ralph Nader:

"None of the happy conditions in Ecotopia are beyond the technical or resource reach of our society."

That kind of gives you an idea of the philosophy in the story.

There's a passage I really liked:

"Every Ecotopian household, thus, is required to compulsively sort all its garbage into compostable and recyclable categories, at what must be an enormous expenditure of personal effort; and expanded fleets of garbage trucks are also needed."

When this book was written in 1975 the idea of sorting garbage was very 'out there.' But today, here in San Francisco we have three garbage cans, the black one, for regular garbage, the blue one, for recyclables, and the green one for compostables. I too thought it would be a pain in the butt to sort my garbage, but what's nice is that while the black can has limits on it, you can put out as much recyclable and compostable garbage as you like. There have been times when I've put out six bags of garbage from the yard or extra boxes of recyclables after Christmas. It's also rewarding to know that a huge portion of my garbage is no longer going to a big old land fill.

The question is, will it catch on? Earnest Callenbach was right... it takes more effort and it takes more garbage trucks and what he didn't anticipate was the homeless who come around all week long trying to pick out the valuable bits of recyclable garbage such as cans and pop bottles. He also probably didn't anticipate the group of neighborhood kids that think its hugely fun to ride the garbage cans down the hills.