I’ve been sick lately. Not deathly ill, but feeling pretty rotten. Last night I was hungry, and having been too under-the-weather to go to the grocery store, I had nary a thing in the fridge. So I did what many Americans would do — I picked up the phone and ordered in.

Forty-five minutes later a bubbly hot pizza and greek salad arrived from my favorite Boston pizza joint (www.theuppercrustpizzeria.com). I put on a movie and indulged. It was exactly the kind of healing evening I needed. At the end of the movie, I went to put the leftover pizza away and toss the plastic container the salad came in. I went over the area in my kitchen where I have three trash cans — one for paper, one for trash and one for cans, plastic and glass. The salad container was a prime candidate for basket number 3, but I was feeling lazy — heck I wasn’t feeling well, right? And so I watched as my hand moved to throw the container in the trash. Halfway through the air, I stopped. I looked at the plastic container. All I needed to do to recycle it was turn around, step 2.5 steps to the sink, run the water, rinse the container and then put it in the recycle bin. What was my lazy-assed problem?

So I turned around, stepped 2.5 steps, flipped my kitchen faucet (like magic, the water began to run), rinsed the container, turned and tossed it into Bin #3. Recycling that one plastic container took me about 18 seconds. Maybe 20 because I was medicated. My point is this. Life here in the US is easy. We are so lucky. And so fortunate. And we often let ourselves get away with laziness because there’s no reason not to.

I have a really good reason to recycle. The minuscule effort that I make to recycle almost everything that comes through my home is a teensy-tiny reminder of how simple my life is and how with a little effort, I can help make a difference in the world. When I think about the one finger I used to turn on my kitchen sink to rinse out the salad container that was delivered to my door not an hour earlier, I am reminded of the plight of the people in the world whose lives aren’t quite as simple as mine. For example:

• The average distance a woman in Africa and Asia walks to collect water (she can’t just turn on the faucet) is 3.75 miles. (www.whrnet.org)
• The weight of water that women in Asia and Africa carry on their heads is equivalent to the maximum baggage weight allowed by airlines, 44lbs (www.whrnet.org)
• One-third of women in Egypt walk more than an hour a day for water; in other parts of Africa, the task can consume as much as eight hours. (www.unfpa.org)
• Medical research has documented cases of permanent damage to women’s health as a result of carrying water, such as chronic fatigue, spinal and pelvic deformities, and effects on reproductive health including spontaneous abortion. (www.unhabitat.org)

My illness had to do with a staph infection that I got and for which I was hospitalized. It was not trivial, but it feels it, when you compare it to the 1.5 BILLION people in the world who are infected with water-borne parasite infections, (www.whrnet.org) and don’t have Massachusetts General Hospital and fourth-line antibiotics at their disposal. And yet somehow, I almost didn’t recycle that plastic salad container.

So next time you are feeling too lazy or rushed or ambivalent about recycling, I asked you to keep in mind these tidbits from Patt Morrison’s article “Green Guilt Trip” first published in The Los Angeles Times.

• “Every time you go fluorescent (the bulbs last nearly 10 times longer than Thomas Edison’s), you save more than a quarter-ton of coal and all the sulfur dioxide and acid rain and sundry gunk that comes with coal. One bulb does all that.
  

• You throw away three pounds of trash every day; two pounds of that could be recycled, unless you like the idea of living next to Landfill World

• You’re adding 10% or 20% to your electric bill and sucking coal and oil by keeping energy vampires plugged in: phone chargers, TVs and printers.

• Pour away a gallon of motor oil instead of recycling it, and you’re dumping enough energy to dry your hair for 216 days or to watch 60 Super Bowls.”

And if that isn’t enough to thrill you, here’s what Morrison has to say about the future:

“If Philip K. Dick, the man who inspired “Blade Runner,” were alive, he would be scribbling dystopian environmental novels in which every newborn child is assigned a lifetime carbon debit card - like wartime ration cards. You only get to use so much plastic, or burn so much wood or eat so much imported food (how much fossil fuel does it take to get that bottle of Euro-water to Santa Monica?) before you use up your carbon points and you’re out of the game. Dick’s characters wouldn’t be stock traders, they’d be carbon traders, blackmailing starving Sudanese villagers online for their carbon points in exchange for rice and water.”

… and of exactly what you are wasting:

“Plastic: You’re not throwing away plastic bags, genius - you’re throwing away oil. In energy alone, recycling a ton of plastic bags saves 11 barrels of oil. Which means that Californians, by tossing away 19 billion plastic bags last year - all of them blowing across my lane of the freeway - wasted about 4.5 million barrels of oil. And those darling little plastic water bottles you tossed - 18 million barrels of oil to make them. What, did you think the Sparkletts fairy whisked them all away?

Paper: The lungs you ruin may be your own. A mature tree eats 13 pounds of carbon dioxide every year, so every time you don’t recycle a huge stack of envelopes and junk mail and wrapping paper and newspapers, you’re murdering a tree that could have saved you. You could heat your house for six months on the energy saved from recycling a ton of paper.

Aluminum cans: Too lazy to shuffle to the recycling bin? The energy you waste by throwing away a single soda can would run your TV for three hours. Throwing away an empty six-pack is like throwing away nearly a $3.50 gallon of gasoline. We Americans toss away enough aluminum cans in a year to rebuild every commercial airliner in America. Good work, cola-for-brains.”

So my point, and I do have one, is this: You too can make a difference. And that is an essential characteristic of The Social Age. Each of us can do our part, however small, to make the world a kinder, gentler, more sustainable place. Recycling your cans and your Sunday paper might not make it easier for the water-carrying women in Africa, but that tiny moment of effort might make you more connected with and sensitive to, the world at large.

Thanks to www.dropinthebucket.org for gathering some of the facts in this post.
PhotoCredit: WaterAid / Caroline Penn