Our longest-lasting legacy on this planet, as a species, will likely be a layer of plastic we’ve deposited across the globe. The Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch is now twice the size of Texas, 9 feet deep, and weighs 7 million tons. NASA claims that the global temperature is increasing at 10 times the rate it would be if this were a natural ice age recovery.

More close to home, the buoy anchors at Ruedi are now onshore and the buoys bob sadly in about 5 inches of water.

Our community needs to work together to do our part in slowing our destruction of our world. Seventy-five percent of all trash Americans throw away is recyclable, yet only 25 percent of that actually gets recycled. Recycling keeps plastic, which takes a minimum of 450 years to degrade (U.S. National Park Service; Mote Marine Lab), aluminum, which takes at least 200 years to break down (Cleveland State University), and glass, which takes around a million years (New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services), out of the landfill and out of our oceans.

Our recycling center was moved out to the South Canyon Landfill to give the land it used to be on to the elementary school. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. four days a week. It’s way out of town, it’s a dangerous drive for lots of people to be making in the winter, and it overall isn’t a practical solution to this town’s recycling issues. City Council explored lots of options when it decided to move the center, but to no avail. Private pickup can be as much as $22 a month. Waste Management charges $11 a pickup.

Please contact City Council if you would support a tax-funded, citywide recycling pickup program. We need to come together as a community to make this happen, and we need to educate about the importance of this small act and the difference it can make to the amount of raw material we collect, the amount of trash we spread across the planet, and the damage we do to our little blue world.

Victoria Madden

Glenwood Springs