I was in a bit of a hurry to get my "Leaving Las Vegas" post up this morning, so I forgot my number one pet peeve about this place (ok, it’s technically tied for number one with the peeves about lousy drivers and speedbumps, but...):
The complete and utter lack of anything resembling a recycling program. At the hotel, at my apartment complex, in stores, anywhere you go, recycling is non-existent. It’s not even like they pretend they’re trying to recycle.
It bugs me especially at the hotel, where, as you might imagine, we generate incredible amounts of packaging trash. Big sturdy boxes that once held danish dough or bags of chocolate chips or cake circles are dumped into the trash by the score. Ditto all the plastic jugs of corn syrup and honey and olive oil. Oh, I could go on, but that won’t change anything. I asked a few of the chefs and sous chefs about it and they just shrugged.
I shudder to think it’s every hotel on the Strip generating that kind of non-recycled packaging "trash" on a daily basis.
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They don't recycle in Vegas? You're kidding! That may sound like sarcasm, but it's not, I'm genuinely surprised by this. It reminds me of something I ran into a few years back:
I moved to Portland in 1999. I'd been living in Grand Rapids, MI for a few years before the move, and GR had a pretty good recycling program, by Michigan standards, anyway. We didn't peel the labels off the cans, or separate paper from plastic or anything like that, but everything that could be recycled went into "the bin," that ubiquitous plastic tub(s) we all know so well these days. So by the time I arrived in Stumptown, I was pretty well indoctrinated into the whole recycling thing, and settled into my newly adopted hometown's somewhat more stringent recycling protocol without too much trouble. Without realizing it, I soon became a true west-coast recycling zealot.
Fast-forward to 2004. I went back to Michigan for the first time in five years for a friend's wedding. And of course, I stayed with my folks for that week in Saginaw. And in the course of that week, I happened to stumble upon the recycling bin in their garage. To my shock and horror, I found that it was being used to store old paint cans! My parents had never even once used it for its intended purpose! My parents, who had both been teachers, faithful progressive democrats, union organizers even, were storing old paint cans in their recycling bin!!! When I confronted them with what to me seemed such an egregious transgression, they just stared at me like I was a rock sample from the moon! To put it simply, they just didn't get it.
What can you do in a case like this? How do you explain to somebody close to you that they are behaving in an totally unacceptable way when they apparently don't have the tools to understand what you're telling them?
And how in the name of God to you explain this to the entire city of Las Vegas???
To this day, I still don't know how my parents are using their recycling bin. I would hope that they're using it the way I use mine, but who knows... At the very least, I hope they're using it to store something not quite so toxic as old paint cans.
I think it's safe to say that our generation knows better... Thankfully!
sadly, tommy, i would argue that our generation knows no better...
the chefs and cooks our age were just as indifferent, if not even more so, than the older ones when i whined about the lack of recycling. while the older ones seemed clueless (one exception are the chefs at school, especially the european ones, and *especially* the german ones, who are obsessed with recycling and go through the garbage and deduct points from the whole class if anything recyclable is thrown away), to me it seems the younger ones actively don't care. from them i usually got a snide comment, such as "yeah, well, global warming is going to kill us all anyway" or, my absolute favorite, "i bet you're a vegetarian too, huh?" (to which i gave my standard reply when "accused" of being vegetarian, which actually happens a lot to me: "i believe animals have feelings. but i still eat them.")
Jeez... I guess that doesn't surprise me too much. Kitchen work does seem to draw a certain nihilistic element. You'll be gald to know that up here in the northwest, among people I know anyway, recycling is just taken for granted as the normal way of dealing with trash (I once briefly had a roommate from Siberia - where they apparently throw their trash directly into the nearest river - who didn't get the recycling thing right away, but he eventually fell in line...). We also have a bottle refund law, which makes a HUGE difference.
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