Scuttlebutt by Mitch McFarland
Last month I wrote about the Point Arena recycle drop-off to report that the contamination situation had become so bad that the hauler was asking the City to close the drop-off. A committee of city officials met with the hauler and devised a plan to re-organize the system to avoid any confusion on the part of users with the goal of eliminating non-recyclable items and keeping the facility available for public use.
After a brief closure of the facility to clean the area, repair the fence and bring in new, clearly labeled containers, a new collection system will begin. The closure will be October 10-17. Be sure to recycle before that so the closure will not affect you.
The new system will consist of four bins, one each for paper and cardboard, glass, metal cans (steel and aluminum), and plastic containers labeled #1 and #2 (HDPE and LDPE).
The hauler has already erected a sign that describes in great detail what is and what is not accepted at the drop-off. This will be very valuable for those who are interested in reading the whole thing. Given the public's well known lack of interest in reading instructions, it must be assumed that many will not bother reading the whole thing or trying to understand it. Simple, specific notations will appear on each of the four bins specifying exactly what is accepted. Hopefully, this will put an end to “wish-cycling” in which someone thinks maybe something is recyclable, so I'll just toss it in there and let someone else figure it out. This thinking is what got us to the point of losing the facility. That and, of course, the people who simply can't resist an open dumpster and don't give a hoot about recycling, circular economy, sustainability, good citizenship, personal responsibility, or any of the other factors that lead to being an alert, intelligent member of society.
When it reopens the facility will be open from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. Scofflaws love the dark of night and it is believed that much of the trash being put in the bins arrives in the evening when no one is around. Who needs to recycle at night anyway?
Many may not know this, but there has been a surveillance camera system at the cove for some time. Gross and repeated violators of the drop-off will be contacted. I'm not sure what steps will be taken, but if it was up to me, repeat violators would be sentenced to working at the drop-off to gain some perspective.
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Speaking of surveillance I've been reading about the disappearance of privacy. One of the things that I find odd is the dichotomy between the fact that many people welcome their loss of privacy in the name of convenience and yet most of us also fear the implications of a surveillance state. Uploading our lives to the Internet, storing huge amounts of our personal info in the cloud, having an Alexa type Internet connected device always alert in our home all seem like good ideas to many people. In fact the latest thing in the convenient lifestyle is “Radio Frequency Identification Chips” (RFIDs)—implanted under the skin to provide all kinds of alleged benefit to the user. RFID chips currently are used mostly on plastic cards as a way, for example, to log onto a company computer. I wonder long before that becomes too “inconvenient”.
On the other hand, many of us are aware of the horrendous brain police tactics that the Chinese are inflicting on the people in the province of Xinjiang. They make George Orwell's vision of a police state look like a Libertarian convention and include tracking via street cameras, facial recognition algorithms, biometrics, abundant checkpoints, and constant screening of digital devices, effectively making them live inside what the New York Times described as a “virtual cage.” The system is so intrusive that if you go to the gas station too many times a day, the system will pick up on that as something abnormal, flag it, and the police will send someone to investigate.
It is an incredible trade-off that the public is being forced to consider. Sure, an RFID under your skin might make it easier to enter a restricted space (no worries of forgetting your badge), but do you really want to have your location constantly available on the Internet- oh yeah, it already is with our cellphones.
It may be appealing to some people to upload their lives to social media. It seems like innocent fun, but will they feel the same 20 years from now when that stuff is still out there?
Someone once said that Google knows more about you than your wife does. There is a punchline there somewhere, but I have a hard time coming up with a laugh.
It seems the basic questions about convenience vs privacy have to do with who has your data, what are they doing with it, and do you trust them? None of these questions have clearcut answers, so I would like to say that, for me, I was pretty happy before all these modern “conveniences” came into being and I could go on without any of them. But that is not possible unless I decide to enter an ashram and spend the rest of my days tending a vegetable garden and meditating. Hey, would that be so bad?
