January 27, 2011
Opinion
Make it a goal: cleaner roadsides
RALEIGH -- Terminal 2 at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport is fully open now, and that's a great thing for the airlines using it and the passengers who will be arriving and leaving. I've been through airport terminals from Albany to Zurich, and I think we have a real winner.
First impressions are tremendously important, and the new airport space with its light and openness, not to mention the subtle influences of North Carolina, will show travelers the forward thinking and design sensitivity of the Triangle. The thousands of hockey fans descending on the RBC Center for the NHL All-Star game will be impressed, so the expense of speeding the conclusion of the job was money well-spent.
Given the positive impressions that arrival will create, I can only hope that the sun will have set before most visitors make the drive into town from the airport. The litter-strewn highways of the area are a mess, in stark contrast to the new terminal.
I teach in Tompkins Hall at N.C. State, and as I walk to and from class I am never too far from the royal blue recycling bins the university has placed nearly everywhere. It's pretty easy to do the right thing and toss in a can or bottle while walking past.
But apparently it's even easier to throw that bottle or can into a classroom wastebasket, destined for a landfill and decades of decomposition, or out the car window. Since I always use the recycling containers and do not toss out my trash, I wonder why more people do not.
There is simply no question that failing to recycle is an untenable waste, but an accompanying and huge issue is that of litter along the highways.
Environmentalism might be a tough sell in North Carolina, though, so it's probably better to approach the matter from an aesthetic, rather than ecological, perspective. I have been a bit embarrassed over the years by the number of visitors who have commented on the beauty of North Carolina being badly marred by trash on the roadside.
One bit of legislation that could help reduce clutter, litter and waste would be a bottle bill for North Carolina. Eleven states already have these in place, and I am hard pressed to imagine why North Carolina could not also have one. Are the residents of Michigan, New York and Iowa, for instance, somehow more capable than North Carolinians of appreciating the value of a bottle bill and making it happen? Are they more sensitive to litter? I doubt it.
In a nutshell, a bottle bill uses the incentive of deposits to encourage people to return cans and bottles, collecting 5 or 10 cents each, rather than simply throwing them away. Of course, the consumer pays the deposit at the time of purchase, so it's neither a gain nor a loss. The merchant collecting the items, though, does make a small additional payment for each one to cover the associated costs.
For decades, returnable, refillable bottles were the norm. I remember getting Cokes in those iconic heavy glass bottles at roadside gas stations, draining them and putting the bottles in a crate by the vending machine. They would be collected, washed and refilled.
It's not done that way today, as the plastic and aluminum are recycled, not refilled, but the point is the same - to keep some control over the containers and prevent them from winding up in landfills or alongside Interstate 40. North Carolina is beautiful but has an abysmal roadside litter problem, and no number of orange-striped work crews is going to make much of a dent; there's just too much.
The beverage bottling industry has spent millions of dollars over the years trying to prevent bottle bills. The bottlers cite the added expense (read: lower profits) of dealing with the bottles and cans and even have tried to deflect anti-litter legislation by inventing clever advertising ploys.
Remember "Put Litter in Its Place"? The cynical slogan's focus was on throwing containers into the trash to keep them from the roadsides, and it did not encourage deposits and recycling. The upshot was that the taxpaying public - even people who did not drink the beverages - bore the expense of hauling the waste and maintaining the landfills.
It is too late to do much of anything about the litter that visitors for the hockey game are going to see. But with the same sort of visionary thinking that led to the wonderful new airport terminal (and maybe will lead to a bottle bill), the Triangle will be consistent in its attention to an attractive, litter-free world for residents and visitors alike.
Bob Kochersberger directs the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at N.C. State University.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/01/27/946555/make-it-a-goal-cleaner-roadsides.html#storylink=misearch#ixzz1D21QnD00
