Bernie Bischoff
Contributing Writer
Imagine this: A windy Saturday, you are hungry and you go to open the fridge door, but there is a presence in the room with you, a presence of death. As soon as the seal between fridge door and fridge is breached, a stench emanates from the depths of the icy tundra of the fridge. Your face scrunches into horror as you realize that a dark pit of forgotten despair sits just beyond the breadth of the tantalizing orange juice: the hummus has gone bad.
Now you have become the victim of a moral quandary that has plagued thousands, no, millions of innocent souls: do you wash out the foul container, or do you despair and abandon all hope, and cast the blasted thing into the trash? It says on the container that it’s recyclable, you have a moral duty as a citizen to do your due diligence and wash the container out, touch the strange fuzz that has begun to infect your hummus and put the vessel into the recycling bin where it belongs. But the allure, the siren’s song of the trash can beckons you close, it whispers into your ear, “It could all be done with, you wouldn’t have to stain your hands with filth, you could simply throw the little container into me, what harm could it do? It’s only one bit of trash, there will be plenty more opportunities to recycle tomorrow.” What do you do? What is the right thing to do?
I am sure we have all been in a similar situation to this before. Maybe not this exact one, but as someone who was raised to recycle, I must always think about my actions before putting a can into the trash or a pizza box into the recycle bin. It’s a bit of a dilemma because I really don’t want to have to wash out the container, it’s nasty and gross! And I don’t want to have to smell it, much less touch it. But the other part of me knows that, morally speaking, I am supposed to recycle whenever I can. And so I am stuck in this difficult situation between what is “right,” and what I personally want to do.
So what’s the answer? There’s of course no clear answer, and it’s a minor conundrum in the grand scheme of things, but I think it’s also systematic of how someone thinks of the world, and how they might approach other much different problems in their life. My verdict, not that my opinion matters all that much, but my verdict is that it’s okay to throw it in the trash.
Next time this happens, you don’t have to feel so guilty about not recycling, because I firmly believe that it’s more important that you are recycling at all than being perfect about it. In order to change things, we don’t need 100 perfect recyclers; we need 1,000 imperfect recyclers. Life’s hard, and it’s almost impossible for everyone to be perfect all the time (except for me; I am perfect all the time), so we shouldn’t hold ourselves to the standard of perfection; we should hold ourselves to a standard that tries. Tries and sometimes fails, but tries nonetheless.
And this idea isn’t just about recycling; I think that in any systematic issue, we need the imperfect to ever achieve change. Sure, in the case of recycling, corporations are about 71% percent of the global emissions, but that doesn’t mean we should give up trying to make little amounts of change because once again, even if it’s not perfect, it’s more important to try.
All of this being said, of course, if you can manage to clean the can or container and recycle it, that is better, but it’s totally okay if you don’t. Now, has this whole article been just an excuse to justify me throwing away nasty things in the fridge? …Who could say? But now I pose these questions. What do you think? Which is the better thing to do? Go ask someone else and get into a big argument: is it better to wash or not to wash?
