Ask Eartha Steward

Eartha hit the road this past week for a little free wheelin' fun slightly reminiscent of the old days of Dead tour. While not selling kind veggie burritos to get to my next destination, I was on another mission: The quest to leave less waste in my wake across this great nation.

I pride myself on being waste-aware and more than a little obsessive about recycling and reuse. But, road trips are inherently different. Leaving the comforts and commitments of home on the other side of the Eisenhower Tunnel, it can be like getting a free pass to eat junk food and waste more.

I know that reducing waste on a road trip is a difficult task. My very understanding husband and I have had many heated discussions about the true value of a tiny bag of Doritos or whether we would use more gas by hauling our recyclables back to Colorado than we would save by ultimately recycling them.

"It's a vacation," he says, "lighten up and enjoy the planet." But what is always left in the wake of those quicky stops at a multitude of gas station mini marts is more trash than we would normally produce in a full week.

Rest areas and gas stations aren't equipped to handle even the simplest aluminum can recycling. Tempting pit stops for quick, cheap food come with big waste tags (my new phrase to describe the unaccounted for garbage and packaging). And much of the country seems decades behind even the most rural of Colorado's recycling communities.

So, armed with my Terra Pass (renewable energy credits, like you can purchase for the Wind 100 Challenge, designed to offset your vehicle emissions), reusable coffee mugs and plastic cups, cloth napkins and a very understanding husband, I set off to test my quest.

Before we left Colorado, we stopped at a Whole Foods to cash in on the gift card we received for signing up for wind energy from Renewable Choice and stocked up on chips, sweets, drinks and other assorted road food snacks to quench those urges to shop at gas stations.

I stashed extra plastic grocery bags and neatly folded some sturdy boxes to carry our recyclables from town to town and back to Colorado if I had to. I kept the car clean and organized, sorting as we went. I had a moment of what I thought was pure brilliance (that my husband later described as true insanity) when I tried to sort the "organics" or biodegradable materials out of the trash.

The 90-plus degree weather across Kansas, coupled with the lack of a plan to compost the material, quickly proved that my desire to compost was well ahead of any viable system. Short of stopping at one of the feedlots and factory farms off I-70 to inquire about a depository for my biodegradable wastes, I was not going to be able to compost my carefully sorted organics.

We did have our successes in this quest to waste less. At Kickapoo State Park in Illinois we found our first recycling center: a lovely, clean, comprehensive and organized site with some obvious love behind it. We gratefully dropped our carefully sorted recyclables from the first thousand miles of travel, and I was once again filled with hope for America.

But we had our low points too, including a stunningly strange stop at a gas station paired with a Dairy Queen. Since we had a nice, big reusable cup we agreed that we could enjoy a frosty treat without the disposable paper cup to deal with.

"I'd like a large Snickers Blizzard," I said to the young lady behind the counter, "but can you please put it in this cup instead of the paper one." She didn't answer but took my plastic cup and went to the back to talk to what I presumed was her manager. They had a lengthy discussion, looking and gesturing at me around the corner with very puzzled expressions. She came back to her station and proceeded to make my frosty treat.

I breathed a sigh of relief and watched as she mixed and whirred candy and ice cream. But, much to my dismay, she took the metal cup and poured its contents into a paper cup, then took the paper cup and poured it into my reusable plastic cup. She tossed the paper cup into the trash can behind the counter and handed me my precious frozen ice cream treat, still with a puzzled look.

Maybe there was some non-verbalized health code reason that she couldn't pour that Blizzard into my own cup. Maybe she just didn't understand what I was trying to do. But one thing was evident. There is a lot of work to do in America to get us to a point where single-use disposability isn't the norm.



Eartha Steward is written by Carly Wier, Holly Loff, and Beth Orstad, consultants on all things eco and chic at the High Country Conservation Center, a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to waste reduction and resource conservation in our mountain community. Eartha believes that you can walk gently on our planet, even if you're wearing stylie shoes.

Submit questions to Eartha at recycle@colorado.net with Ask Eartha as the subject or to High Country Conservation Center, PO Box 4506, Frisco, CO 80443.