recycle this
I only learned just this morning that apparently Tacoma as a city is scrapping its curbsite pickup for glass recycling, and to call that a disappointment—for a city of 216,000 people, third-largest in Washington (and Spokane has always only barely been larger)—would be one hell of an understatement.
Scott was the one who told me about this, and it reminded me that I learned on Christmas Day that Olympia was doing the same thing; I was pretty shocked even by that. What Scott—and Rebecca from the Sustainability & Envrionmental Responsibility department, who had entered into the conversation—pointed out about the Tacoma change was that it was in response to China banning the import of recycling as of last year, meaning it's a lot more expensive for U.S. cities to do it themselves. It occurred to me then that, in all likelihood, Olympia had the same rationale. No one at Dad and Sherri's on Christmas seemed to know what the reason was, but the China thing is indeed what it's about.
I remember when I heard about China's policy change: this is what we get for relying on another country to take care of our recycling for us. We shut down our own facilities, and now have no option with China out of the picture but to put a bunch of recyclable materials into landfills, or we just burn it. Of course, a whole lot of "recycling" is now known to be a myth anyway; shifting to reusable materials and compost was probably the better idea all along.
Still, it's dispiriting to think about all of this. The world was getting trashed already, and this is just another thing making it worse. And this isn't even something we can blame on Preisdent Fuckwit! Although one can assume a Democrat in the White House would have been a lot more likelier to put focus on finding a new solution, and God knows President Fuckwit doesn't give a shit. To be fair, even a Democrat probably would not have made much more than a negligible difference. Then again, every little bit counts, I suppose.
I'm relieved, at least, to know Seattle is keeping curbsite pickup for glass recycling, although I just discovered only this morning that our local plants come with their own problems. Fuck, none of this shit is ever simple, is it!
I mean, whatever. We're all going down anyway. But I refuse to go down without a fight! Or at least bitching about how wrong everything is! Maybe my dying words will be "God damn it you guys!"
I spent my evening at home last night. Shobhit and I made lasagna, with the last box of noodles we never used for the massive amount of lasagna we used for the lunch we made for everyone in Wallace, Idaho on the 8th. We meant to use up the rest of the large bag of Costco spinach we still had, and although I used a lot of it, I could only manage to use about half. I put only two layers of noodles in the casserole dish and with all the other stuff layered in between, I still had to put one layer of noodles, with spinach and cheese and vegetables and veggie ground, in another tin pan. That second tin isn't quite ideal since it has only one layer of noodles, but whatever, it works. Also, even after I had one helping and Shobhit had two helpings for dinner, the leftovers got put into seven boxes for lunches, and probably one or two dinners. I think we're good for the week.
So, while that was baking, I finalized and saved my "2019 in Ten Minutes" video. I've had such problems with restrictive bullshit on YouTube, this time around I chose not to upload it there at all. I have a feeling I won't have any "copyright violation" problems on Flickr, so that's where I posted it. That means the link won't auto-play on Facebook, but YouTube links don't anymore either, so that hardly makes any difference; people there will have to click through either way. I also posted it here on this blog this morning, where, thankfully, videos can be posted playable and imbedded just like YouTube videos are. I always love these videos, every year. Watching them makes me incredibly happy.
Danielle is getting a disproportionate amount of airtime within those ten minutes this year, just because there is a lot of content from the two trips we went on together. A couple of the video clips from other times of the year still feature Shobhit, though, and he certainly shows up in more of the photos than anyone else, as always.
So then Shobhit and I watched a couple episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which is always delightful.
[posted 12:21 pm]