The environment will thank us, part 1.

Today is Earth Day, the one day per year where we acknowledge the giant (approximately) oblate spheroid of rock/ductile rock/magma on which we live. What are you doing for Earth Day? The Earth Science Club here at Tech has a little lunch where they discussed some issues. I think there were about 7 people there when I left (to go to class). Nice idea, although they were not to warm to my suggestion that they should start a community garden for the grad students in an effort to eat more local food.

The City of Socorro has "started" a recycling program here, which basically consists of a company that picks up your recycling happening to move from the East Mountains (east of Albuquerque) down to Socorro. I am dubious that this has been an effort on the part of the City. The recycling company actually calls itself Morning WoodCutters, which, if you are like me and watched a lot of Beavis and Butthead will strike you as either hilariously funny or generally shocking. And to drive home the point that this is not any kind of accidental naming, scope out this picture on the Morning WoodCutters website, which leaves very little to the imagination.

The upshot of the Socorro recycling thing is that you pay $20 a month for MWC to come to your house and pick up your recycling once a month. If you want a one-time pickup (that utilizes the entire truck), this will cost you all of $90. I recommended to those at the lunch that, if they go to Albuquerque once every month or so anyway, it would be much smarter for them to just take their recyclables up there themselves. I guess I should have encouraged the local option for the benefit of those who cannot go to Albuquerque. However, I would have taken less than that per person to transmit recyclables up to Albuquerque back when we lived in Socorro. (By the way, according to the City website it looks like the range of materials that MWC will recycle is the exact same stuff that Albuquerque recycles, leading me to believe that they just dump it off on the same recycling company).

The school is trying to get the Earth Science Club to handle the recycling for the entire campus, which consists of collecting recyclables (plastic bottles and aluminum cans only) from 38 different points on campus and taking them up to Albuquerque. Now, mind that the club is not going to get paid for any of this. I think maybe they get to keep can revenues, but that is unclear. Maybe with MWC now collecting recyclables it would make a lot of sense for the school to shell out $90 per month for its very own recycling runs (I'm pretty sure they spend much less that on flowers every month) and get one of the FacMgmt people to collect stuff. I made this suggestion, we'll see if it actually happens.

I didn't intend to actually write anything about Socorro, and was instead going to be all caustic about the Bush administration, but I guess this will have to be broken into multiple posts...