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When our supposedly "green" County of Santa Cruz, California, started its recycling program, for the first year they land-filled it all. When asked, they told me straight up that they were behind schedule but they still wanted us to do it to, "get into the habit." As the program has deteriorated, it has only got worse.

Just try recycling a curly light bulb or fluorescent tube these days. Here, those get trucked over 500 miles to an "appropriate" mercury reprocessing facility. It turns out that "recycling" LED light-bulbs is just as painful. Far WORSE are lithium batteries. In inquiring about "proper disposal" they wanted me to drive 30 miles to the nearest recycling center.

I do these things not because I care all that much about doing it for the planet as I want to learn and understand the current state of the art, so to speak as might be applied to product design. I tear apart all sorts of dead items for reprocessing, just to learn about what it takes. My actual goal here is to use as much as I can without sending it to the landfill. Cardboard especially I put into the wood-stove to slow the combustion. It keeps the thing from forcing us to open windows on winter nights.

Cardboard box technology has made astonishing leaps in recent years with all these interlocking tabs eliminating the need for glue to erect them. As anybody who has operated or maintained a glue machine would attest, the damned things are a total headache. Yet look at what Amazon has done in that realm. They went from popcorn to air bags, to crushed paper, and now are getting rid of boxes in a big way with these heavy paper envelopes because of the bag/bins they have for delivery trucks now. The process has moved forward very quickly.

We just have to get serious about burning the damned plastic.