I obtained my first part time job when I was a teenager in high school, working at a little country store/gas station. My uncle owned and operated what we now know as a convenience store that was located right next door to our house, and I worked there in the afternoons when I got home from school. The first thing I had to do when I got to work was to take all the empty soft drink bottles, organize them by brand and size, and get them ready for when the delivery man made his weekly trip to the store. There probably aren't very many people under the age of thirty-five who even know what I'm talking about, but when you would buy a Coke, you would pay a deposit on the bottle, which was made of glass, and when you came back to buy another one, you were exempt from the deposit if you returned your bottle that you had already paid for.
At about that same period of time, there was a company called "Shasta" that came out with a drink that could be purchased in a metal can that could be thrown away after use, thus eliminating the need for a deposit. That idea was slow to catch on, but over time, other companies began to migrate toward that idea, and in the process, they made the glass bottles start moving toward extinction. Next came the plastic bottles with the slogan, "No deposit...no return." Then came another revolutionary idea that made many people say that its originator had to be an idiot...selling water in plastic bottles. I wish I would have been the one who came up with that crazy idea. Now, when you walk into a convenience store, you will have a choice of at least a half dozen brands of drinking water...all in plastic bottles.
Here's what I find ironic about this whole process: Back when we were strictly using glass bottles for our soft drinks, no one ever gave a moment's consideration about conservation or the environment. Now we rarely go a whole day without hearing someone using a new term, "being green," which has almost nothing to do with color. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a "tree hugging" radical, but I do have to say that I too am concerned with the amount of plastic that we are simply throwing away. And the thing about it is, if two hundred years from now, someone digs into one of our landfills, they will find those bottles almost as intact as they are when we put them there. In addition to the plastic bottles are all the diapers that are also being deposited into the landfills by the hundreds of thousands every day. During the time when we were drinking our Pop from returnable glass bottles, we were also clothing our babies with reusable cloth diapers. Not many people do that any more. I recently heard one young mother say, "I decided I wanted to go green and start using cloth diapers, and it worked okay until my baby pooped in one of them. You can't reuse that!"
Now, on a daily basis, innovators are coming up with all kinds of revolutionary ideas about how to recycle many of the products that we carelessly toss into our trash cans without even thinking about it. My son, who works for a uniform company, was telling me about some suits that they have made for the employees of a large hotel chain that they service, and those suits are made totally from recycled plastic bottles. That's just one of thousands of ways that we can help to care for the natural resources with which God has provided us . The biggest obstacle that we face today is persuading the general public to think "green." It seems like the area of the country where I live is much slower at catching on to this new way of thinking than some of the other areas I have visited, but part of that may be due to the difficulty in finding ways to recycle. The grocery store where we shop now has bins in front of their stores for plastic bottles and bags, and it appears that more and more people are beginning to use them. I'm glad to see that, and I'm determined to do my part. But to quote Kermit the Frog: "It's not easy being green."
Preston
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