Recycling is the Best Solution to All the Lonely Litter on the Roadside

By Michael Gold

One thousand years is a long time to be lonely. 

Sitting by the side of the road, abandoned after an all-too-brief encounter with their owners, often flattened by automobiles, lying in the dirt, they silently judge our indifference to their fate.

On a recent two-mile walk through Pleasantville, my daughter and I discovered 24 pieces of various species of litter, including plastic bottles and aluminum cans, plastic and paper coffee cups, three straws, a plastic knife, two ice cream cups and spoons, a Wendy’s Frosty cup and a morose-looking bottle of Fireball Whisky.

They were all reposing quietly on the ground, yet I could hear their needful, gnawing pleas to be adopted by a human again.

I wanted to pick them up and take them home to our recycling box, but my daughter won’t let me until we get a vaccine for COVID-19. This might take a bit of time.

Tompkins Avenue by the railroad line seems to be a special magnet for these forlorn souls. We found Poland Spring and Fanta soda bottles there, and cans of Budweiser, San Pellegrino and White Claw Hard Seltzer.

On Manville Road, around the bridge over the railroad tracks, we saw two Cold Stone Creamery cups and spoons, an empty can of Modelo beer, a plastic Dunkin’ Donuts cup with about four ounces of coffee still in it, a flattened Heineken can and a plastic knife.

On Parkway Terrace, in the scrubby grass by the Saw Mill Parkway, we discovered a can of Arizona Iced Tea underneath a tree, a plastic lid, a plastic straw and an empty pack of Marlboro cigarettes. 

Do the residents of Pleasantville really want to leave these abandoned, lonely creatures to rot on their own?

In the case of plastic bottles, that could take 450 to 1,000 years. Aluminum cans can survive for 80 to 200 years in the wild. Paper cups have the easiest time – only 20 years to crumble into decomposed bits.

What can Pleasantville residents do about these degraded, yet still salvageable souls?

We could hire a talented vocalist to sing Frank Sinatra songs to all the discarded items left around town. That might make them feel a bit less unloved. Probably wouldn’t work, though.

The most obvious answer is not to litter around town. But maybe we should question why we’re buying some of these products in the first place.

For instance, why are we buying bottled water? It’s often no purer or higher quality than tap water. Why not just buy a metal water bottle and fill it at home? It can take four to six ounces of oil to manufacture one plastic bottle. It adds up to about 17 million barrels of oil a year to make all the bottles we consume, according to the Pacific Institute.

Countless lonesome bottles end up struggling to swim in our world’s oceans. About eight million tons of plastic go in the ocean every year (source: oceanconservancy.org).

Concerning aluminum, all our unrecycled aluminum cans waste 16 million barrels of oil annually. American consumers throw out $700 million worth of aluminum cans every year.

Recycling what we consume is important, and too few people do it. But there are alternatives.

One possibility is to purchase recycling boxes, similar to the ones on the Metro-North train platform. A basic concrete, two-bin receptacle with one side taking plastic, glass and aluminum and the other side taking trash costs less than $1,000 from Belson Outdoors. One recycling box could be placed in the municipal parking lot off Manville Road near Washington Avenue. Another box could go on the grass by Parkway Field facing Marble Avenue.

We also need to do more to educate our young about this issue, with more curriculum time devoted to why it’s important to cut down on our use of disposable cans and bottles, and to recycle far more than we are currently doing.

Finally, the village can contact the big producers of these goods, who, after all, are some of the biggest culprits in the degradation of the planet. An organization of producers and sellers of plastic and aluminum products have invested in the Closed Loop Infrastructure Fund (CLIF), which exists to help communities fund recycling projects around the country. With funding from PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Starbucks, Amazon and other companies, CLIF provides money for recycling infrastructure and other environmental programs.

Additionally, Coke and Pepsi provide funding for community recycling, including receptable bins for recyclable products, as well as community education programs.

Of course, the companies use these efforts to market and sell their products and image, so the village residents need to vigorously debate the usefulness of these corporate programs as well as the possible disadvantages.

If we cut the amount of litter that could be recycled by 50 percent, then we’re halfway to heaven. Unless I have my math wrong.

Pleasantville resident Michael Gold has published articles in The Washington Post, The New York Daily News and The Albany Times-Union. Miriam Gold provided research assistance for this article.