Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Recyclage



Recycling is a pretty great thing. I need to see a segment on CBS Sunday Morning (man do I miss that!) that explains the whole process. All I really know is what follows:

1) I buy food and domestic products and when they’re used up, I rinse out the containers and put them in the big green bin.
2) Bo brings them out to the curb on Monday nights.
3) Starting at about 5:00 am (or maybe sooner, but I am just sleeping more heavily,) a series of people walk up and down the street picking through the recycling bins, presumably searching for consignment bottles.
4) At around 7:30 am the big trucks come slowly down the street, the sounds of their heavy-duty motors and brakes are joined by the clanking of breaking glass as the bins are emptied into the trucks. The bins are tossed back to the curb.
5) At around 9:00 am the truck comes back to do the other side of the street after having woven its way through the web of one-way avenues.
6) For the next hour or so, these sounds become more and more faint as the truck travels further and further.
7) At some point we retrieve our bins from the curb and put them back in their rightful places, where they wait ready for the next cereal box or juice bottle.
8) I’m missing from step 8 to approximately 100, I think. I could presume that the trucks go to a “facility” where the items are sorted and smashed and crunched and melted and heated etc.
101) As I shop I notice packaging made from recycled materials…and I buy them.
102) See #1…that’s why it’s called re-“cycle”

I’d be interested in filling in some of the gaps. I don’t need to know every single little detail. Like I said, a segment on a morning show where for example a cute little green Heineken bottle is followed from its birth through the consumption of its precious contents to the green bin to the truck, and then the rest! That would be interesting.

Maybe if I knew more about the process, I’d know the answers to some of my questions like…
--How small is too small when recycling a piece of aluminum foil, does it eventually become cost prohibitive? Same question for bottle caps, both metal and plastic.
--Which is better for the environment…paper or plastic bags at the grocery store? I should add that Montreal supermarkets are ahead of the game in selling affordable, functional, and dare I say fashionable reusable shopping bags for $1 each. My problem is that I can’t seem to remember to bring them with me to the grocery store, partially because I often use them for other purposes. We do reuse a lot of the plastic bags from the grocery store for garbage bags, but many tear just from the contents of the groceries so that they are no longer easily reusable.

Ahh, so many things to learn! It isn't easy trying to be green!

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Freewheelin' in Montréal

My mother in law recently gave me her bicycle, which she hadn’t used in years (Merci belle-maman!). The last time I rode a bike was in 1994. Bo has been excited for me to get a bicycle so I can join him on little journeys without the wear and tear on my joints of hiking and even walking around in the city. (Years and years of volleyball and other factors have made me somewhat suddenly “weak in the knees”).

The day after we got it Bo suggested a ride to a “nearby” shopping mall. “It’s only 45 minutes by bike.” 45 MINUTES! I told him he was crazy. I hadn’t even straddled a bike in 13 years and he thought I was just going to be able to hop on for a little jaunt of three-quarters of an hour through the city! I did take the bike to a local asphalt schoolyard and tooled around a bit to get my bearings. The seat needs some adjustments and perhaps replacement, but it turns out that riding a bike after 13 years is well, just like riding a bike!

I’m not overly enthusiastic about riding my bike on the city streets. I’m still getting used to walking the city streets and I see some crazy stuff out there where the cars and bicycles are sharing the road. And I don’t intend to ride my bike on the sidewalk unless I see an extreme need. Bo’s parents also gave us a bike rack for my car, so I’m much more inclined (once the seat situation is resolved), to take the bike to different parks where there are long flat trails shared by bicycles, non-motorized people (and dogs…). The Parc Maisonneuve is not too far from where we live and along the shores of the St. Lawrence River, there are many such parks to explore.

This brings me to the question of cycling attire. The bike Bo’s mom passed on to me is a “women’s bike,” meaning of course that it lacks the highest bar that crosses horizontally on a men’s frame. Seeing it made us wonder why we need two different styles of bike in this day and age and wouldn’t it be simpler to just make one kind of universal frame? Well of course, the missing bar was to accommodate women in skirts right?

Next question…why would a woman today ride a bike in a skirt? Well they do! Everywhere! Women in short, medium, long, flowing, tight and loose skirts are riding bikes all over the city of Montréal. I suppose the long flowing hippy granola bike-riding women are fine. But the short skirts and dresses I see make me scratch my head and go “hmmm?” Of course I never point them out to Bo because I don’t want him to start noticing!

Same goes for the low cut shirts. Now, I've always been sort of modest when it comes to my fashion choices, but when did bicycle-riding women become so provocative? I see cleavage galore on these women and sometimes on other more athletically dressed women who apparently never took the time to stand in front of a mirror and ask themselves “wait, when I lean forward on my bike, am I hanging out of this top?”

So when you see a blond ponytail sticking out of a shiny new red bicycle helmet on a sweatpants-and-turtleneck-wearing woman who is wobbling warily in the bike lane, that’ll be me. You can wave hello, but I may be too freaked-out nervous to notice you, sorry.