ing, plastic and aluminum pouches—all kinds of single service containers which are used once and thrown away. We could take steps to alleviate the situation. A Minnesota law requires that a product entering the market in a new package must be evaluated in terms of energy use and ease of recycling. Several types of packaging are impossible or at best impractical to recycle. Multipackaging, or the use of more than one material (plastic over paper; paper on aluminum) is a recycler's nightmare. Plastic—which depletes non-renewable resources in its manufacture—is difficult to recycle because of a lack of uniformity in grades. Only one percent— or less—of all plastic is recycled. It has been suggested that the best way to deal with garbage is to separate it according to end-use. For example, current farming techniques cause the daily loss of valuable topsoil. A voluminous amount of kitchen waste in Portland could become a useful resource if converted to compost. If the region had to depend exclusively on locally grown food, a recycling policy which mandated separation of organic wastes in order to implement large scale composting efforts would become very attractive. Currently business and industry are not well set up to utilize recycled materials. Full scale recycling efforts will have to be carefully orchestrated in order to be successful, and necessitate an interplay between individuals, neighborhoods, local government, and private enterprise. We are a long way from this ideal at the moment. Making the leap from what is to what could be will require a lot of work, wit, organization and imagination. —Nancy Cosper A PORTLAND VISION ... The question is, how do you choose from all the parts of the world the qualities that make you feel that you are being enhanced? There are places in the world where I'd have a better chance of being employed for doing what I want to do than Portland. But I stress cooperation and connections between things, and what has mattered to me about Portland is that the city is humane. —jack Eyerly J 66
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz