Posted by Snow in 
Sometimes you just need some visual flair to get the recycling gene started. I was walking this weekend and I saw this spray painted message on one of the dumpster bins. I had my first thought that the writing was graffiti. But then I looked again at the message. “Paper Only”.
Where did I see this dumpster? This was for a very large public library. I thought that if everyone with a dumpster took this much care about fending off recycling offenders who threw anything into a recycling dumpster and wasted the effort of hundreds of people over a day/week/month, there might be some green justice in the world.
The kind of place where extra paper in the form of bulletins, email, flyers, and stray printings can make a landfill’s worth of difference a week. The kind of wash of paper virtual offices were designed to avoid. But libraries have so many guest users of the Internet, as well as other patron services, the paper volume must be taxing.
What came home to me forcefully was that someone had cared enough about the end product of the recycling mission to improve the collection run process. Someone had actually thrown up the message that caring about what one might throw into the dumpster might ruin the efforts of others to return some processed paper products to the correct source.
This is such a shift in feeling from the devil-may-care general attitude so prevalent in the 1970′s when I grew up. Back then, one might give a half hearted try at collecting a few tin cans. but nobody got very excited about it.
I can remember a time when to paint a message advising others that this dumpster was for paper only would have been blithely ignored. But in this newer greener world, people may respect this message enough to add their paper to the bin for recycling. I thought about the possibilities for guerrilla recycling and the messages that might be spread.
A Youtube project then took shape in my mind. What if someone went around spraying messages on all the potential recycling waste they saw? What an eye opener for people to check out and review. What if a random group of guerilla recyclers went around, spotting green and sustainable living injustices? They could be the Green Super heroes!
What if someone used washable spray paint, (biodegradable of course), and went around all the alleys in my town, and wrote some messages writ large as in the image, about what might be done with the scrap metal, wood, boxes, metal, glass or other things light industrial businesses throw away every day?
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