Archive: Opinions

I hate those squiggly CFL lightbulbs they want us to use because they save so much energy.  You know why I hate them?  Because their mercury content makes it a bad idea to simply throw them out.  Mercury is bad for the environment, even in filthy landfills.  So I put my dead CFLs in a plastic bag in a drawer, next to the plastic bag of spent printer ink cartridges.

Every so often I take the ink cartridges to the drop box at Best Buy.  It's easy because I am in the area frequently enough that after forgetting to bring them multiple times, I can drop them off in the rare instances when I remember.  But even though I think the county Solid Waste department has a way to dispose of CFLs, I don't know what it is, and it is almost always extremely inconvenient for me to go there just to throw something away.

I love being friendly to the earth, but I yearn for the days of yore when you could just throw stuff out and someone would come and get it and drive it away.  Ah, those were the days -- municipalities included garbage pickup in your property taxes so there were no extra fees and no garbage tags, which meant you didn't have to weigh your trash.. you just tossed it and it went away.

That would be my first choice, but I don't mind drop boxes if they are fairly convenient and available at the odd times I actually remember to recycle something.  I am pretty sure Best Buy put their drop boxes in the store entryway because they think that if I remember to drop off my spent cartridges that I'll need new ones and buy them there.  They are right.  One trip to dump and get more stuff that I will eventually dump.  Customers guaranteed for life!

So I think the new Tompkins County Coalition for Safe Medication Disposal drop boxes are a terrific idea.  The Sheriff's Office isn't as convenient as Best Buy, but I understand why the boxes have to be at police facilities, and I pass the Public Safety building often enough.  I don't like the idea of mixed meds being dumped into the lake or into my ground water, and this is an easy way to deal with it.

You have to wonder whether the Loch Ness Monster or Godzilla came about because of people dumping unused medicines into the water.  That would be bad for the boaters around Cayuga Lake.

I have long held that earth-friendly products and programs will never succeed until they are easy and cheap for people.  So the more obvious throwing away toxic stuff becomes, the more people will do it.  It is just common sense.

As long as someone is establishing drop box locations, why not have boxes for all the things they don't want in our trash?  How great would it be if there were a CFL drop box next to every 'Med Return' box?  You wouldn't have to go to more than one place to get rid of these things, and that would provide more motivation to properly dispose of them.

And my drawer wouldn't be a CFL graveyard any more.

v8i37