The Tongs of Optimism

 
Each generation has its social mottos:

Make Do And Mend

Keep Calm And Carry On

Spend Spend Spend

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

This generation of children is well-versed in the virtues of reduce, reuse and recycle. They have to be. They will carry the burden of our industrial successes and commercial excesses. 

I worry it is an unmanageable burden. I believe in the wisdom of the 3 R’s even as I fear their implementation is inadequate to the task at hand and greater than our individual efforts can affect.

Nevertheless I diligently put out my blue box of recyclables, storing, saving, rinsing and recycling my way out of the funk can descend when thoughts of the vanishing salmon and dying bears intrude on my efforts.

It is not only the salmon that spur me on; it is the belief that we have an obligation to set a tone of optimism and solution-based thinking for our children. How else will they get on with the work that needs so desperately to be done?

In that spirit – ok, maybe not quite that spirit, maybe in the spirit of desperate hopefulness, combined with a momentary lapse in judgment – I became the Recycling Mom at my daughter’s elementary school. A public school, which was constantly inserting the phrase social responsibility into their every message, they had no recycling program for the juice boxes that came to the school in over 400 lunch kits every day. On one of those days I stood in the playground surrounded by discarded tetra packs and I was overwhelmed: all that litter was going straight into the garbage, into the landfill, and eventually back into the drinking water, the soil, the air…

Hello?? Social responsibility?

The funk threatened. 

But. The salmon

The Bears.

Our kids.

I rolled up my sleeves and dug in.

Literally.

There was resistance. From the Administration: too big a project. Can’t ask teachers for involvement on any level. Can’t have janitors breaking rules vis a vis extra collection or storing of bins above & beyond union guidelines.

From the Parents: the children will get sick touching all that nasty recycling. Germs will spread. Where will the 5 cent recycling refund go? That nickel is ours, not the schools’. Lunch hour should be spent playing not patrolling the playground.

From the kids: Ewww. Gross. Initial enthusiasm and inbred optimism quickly evaporated when confronted by decomposing ham sandwiches in the recycling bin.

Still.

Solutions were found, tongs wielded, someone sourced latex gloves, and the recycling program began. A revolving handful of fabulous kids helped out. We didn’t have enough volume for the public school to merit a free pick up so we squeezed and sorted and bagged up 360 juice boxes per returnable bag and I drove the sorted, festering, fruit fly begetting bags to the depot.

It was me and the bottle guys at the depot. Their shopping carts piled high, and street hierarchy firmly in place, they were not exactly welcoming to the new bag lady mum. They yelled at me, I didn’t follow the sorting and returning rules. I couldn’t see where the line was and who was in it. Eventually I got the hang of it. The bottle guys and I were tight by the end of the school year.

The program ran in fits and starts with a few other parents and with whichever kids were enthusiastic that day.

At the end of the first year, I had to go before the Parent Council to justify how the money would be spent. I generated a “report”. It seemed ridiculous. My goal had been to teach our kids to take personal responsibility. Even if it was simply the choice to put a juice box in a blue bin instead of on the ground. Recycling was something I knew they did in fact believe whole-heartedly in doing. But the leap from believing to doing is sometimes a big one.

In the end, over controversy (buy school supplies, buy books) those 5 cents added up to a few hundred dollars. There was enough to sponsor a whale for conservation research in our local waters.

A whale, I hoped, was big enough to embody optimism.

Original post to Canada Moms Blog.

EarnestGirl also get her hands dirty at The West Coast Chronicles.

Image from tetrapack.com