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Page 4 · column 4 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
By KAREN HENDERSON
Rappahannock News Contributing Writer
Every day, you and I generate massive amounts of trash that gets hauled to the dump. After it’s gone, most of us forget about it. It doesn’t cross our minds that each time we drive past the landfill in Amissville, we pass our gift wrap from Christmas, the old milk carton we drank from when no one was watching, and that plastic shower curtain which will live bey ond our lifetime.
Trash is a personal thing, and the nature of the beast is to store it, through the aeons, while it piles up and spreads like creeping kudzu. Both our history and our excesses lie buried somewhere in the Rappahannock landfill, and as every respectable and trash-storing community will tell you, we accumulate our future dilemma there as well.
In Rappahannock County, we recycle 18 percent of our rubbish by weight and volume. Since its inception in our county, the increase in recycling has been steady but not dramatic. Although aluminum re-sale brings the only money from recycling to Rappahannock’s coffers, County Administrator John McCarthy says, “Recycling is revenue positive, if for no other reason than space saved alone.” Harold Artz, landfill manger since 1987, suggests the more we recycle and re-use, the less taxes will have to be raised to develop more landfill space.
The answer to this quandary sounds the ugly and oft-whispered word: recycling, considered a pain by many. Ask the folks who live near the Washington fire hall and hear glass breaking every time a bottle is thrown into the bin. The fact: recycling our trash takes minimal effort, saves precious space in our landfill, and consequently keeps more money in our pockets and more resources on our planet. Each recycled can saves a cup of gasoline. Each glass bottle re-used
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