Wasting away with worries | Editorials

Business lockdowns and restrictions dealt heavy blows to commercial and industrial segments. Displaced workers have worried about slow unemployment benefit checks. Others fortunate to still be working remain nervous about the future.

As vaccines were approved, distributed and are being administered, reports of confirmed cases of morphed strains of coronavirus raise new concern about the effectiveness of these medicines.

As if all these frets haven’t been enough, social disruption and political disturbances have done nothing more than add to the agonies of even the most casual of observers.

With all this mental turmoil brewing, the last thing anyone wants to have to think about is their household trash. But for those with a mind and desire to reduce the amount of solid waste going into our county’s landfill, we have concerns.

Late last March, Hardin County Government suspended its recycling program when the governor stopped inmate community work programs to mitigate risk of prisoner infections and the threat of spreading the virus in the confined jail environment. The county used Hardin County Detention Center inmates to sort recyclables.

Until such programs are allowed to resume by the state, Hardin County Solid Waste Director Stephanie Givens has said the recycling program will remain shuttered.

And even when it does resume, plastics and certain paper materials such as magazines may not be accepted as they once were, Givens warns. And the pandemic is partly to blame. As more people have remained at home during the past 10 months of the pandemic, household waste has increased.

At the same time, domestic and global markets for recycled materials have broken down. It’s a figurative perfect storm of consumer garbage.

Our problem with garbage and how it’s handled predates the pandemic, however.

Nearly 270 million tons of trash is generated in the U.S. each year. The average American tosses out seven and one-half pounds of garbage every day.

Unfortunately, most of it ends up compacted and buried in county landfills such as our own Pearl Hollow facility. Lowering the tonnage that’s hauled and packed down in the ground cells of the landfill is not only better for the environment but for our collective pocketbooks, too, in energy, raw material and landfill management savings.

That’s where the “3 Rs” of recycling come into play. Reducing the amount of domestic waste we produce, learning how to reuse and repurpose things that would normally be tossed into the trash and recycling as much of our plastics, paper, glass and aluminum debris as possible becomes more important each year.

Disruption to existing recycling chains or the absence of such services get folks out of important sorting habits at home and work, and won’t establish any in others who toss their garbage without thought or care.

Givens has encouraged Hardin County residents to keep an eye on the county’s Solid Waste and Recycling department web page for updates.

In the meantime, she recommends hauling household recyclables to Meade County Recycling Center in Bran­den­burg. Meade also maintains a dropoff site in the parking lot at the Flaherty fire station.

But most won’t bother with the inconvenience of doing so.

The pandemic’s end may be in sight thankfully. Unfortunately, our problems with the collection and disposal of garbage and recyclables won’t.

This editorial represents a concensus of The News-Enterprise editorial board.