A little victory

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but the Network Rail depot I work at didn't have recycling in any form whatsoever. Considering how much paper an office uses, this is just absurd. So I've been busily fighting my way through several layers of indifference, bureaucracy and incompetence to try and get a regular paper/cardboard pickup here. I started this about three months ago, maybe a bit more.

Yesterday we finally got a bin dropped off and it felt so damn good to get that reassurance that if you raise a big enough stink and make sure that enough people know about something, you will eventually get results. I then, with some help, took the mountain of paper from the top of a spare desk (which I'd been encouraging people to use as a stop-gap measure until the bin arrived) and cleared it all out. This felt pretty good too, since we no longer have a veritable Wall of Oliver dividing the office (seriously, I'd have taken a picture if I'd thought to - it rose about five feet above the desk surface and cast a remarkable shadow in the afternoon).

Meanwhile I've also had some success bringing recycling to my house. It didn't get any pick-up due to being inside a courtyard, but I found a spare blue box and have been taking the house's recycling to a nearby drop off point once a week for the past five months. It takes all of ten minutes and gets me outside while my pizza (or whatever) is cooking in the oven. This is in addition to the little things (i.e. not leaving appliances on and turning lights out which nobody is using). Doing this stuff has allowed me to finally regain a little sanity. Back in January there were some nights I'd genuinely lose a lot of sleep from worry about what's being done to the one planet we've got. At the worst moments I couldn't help feeling that my life goals were flaky and irrelevant given where, it felt like, we'd be in twenty or thirty years.

I mention these things not to solicit a pat on the back, but because I think that perhaps there are not enough personal, small-scale examples of success with THE BIG OL' ENVIRON-MINT THANG for people to see and feel encouraged by. I think that it can be not unlike when someone sets out to start a big exercise regime and radically overhaul their diet...then looks at the long list of things to do as well as how long before they'll see results, becomes discouraged and throws their hands in the air. I've watched people see all the things they can do to be more environmental and interpret it as some kind of long list of optional chores.

But as with getting fitter and eating better, I really think that living more environmentally is something better approached as a changing of, or integration of new, habits done at a pace that you can assimilate into your daily life. Once you no longer think about being mindful of electricity use, get recycling....once you no longer think about that, look into composting and so on. Well, at least that's my advice.

Meanwhile, on the Big Picture front, Australia is banning old fashioned light bulbs all-together. I think this is a great first step and hopefully more countries will follow their lead. I mean, think about just how many light bulbs there are and what a difference it would make if they were all the greener variety.