Recycling

Country music stars will get a whiff of Eldersburg next week. After being chosen as the official candle of the gift tent at the Country Music Awards on Nov. 1, in Nashville, the Eldersburg-based company, Unwined Candles, will have its products in gift bags for all participants. For owners and creators Dave and Anna Neith, that means late nights and full weekends as he makes more than 300 candles to take to Nashville. "It's a little overwhelming … a good problem to have," Dave Neith said.

Teens at the Children's Home in Catonsville say they are recycling their lives and using art to illustrate their journey. After months of workshops where they turned the ordinary into objets d'art, they have put together an exhibit that will raise funds for the home's capital campaign. Faces - 2012, an evening of wine, art and jazz is set for Wednesday at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Organizers promise "a compelling display of resident artwork showcasing hopes, dreams and talents.

(Another in an occasional series of guest posts by GreenLaurel.com blogger Laurel Peltier) So you finally finished de-cluttering your basement, and the burning question is: Where to recycle golf clubs, VHS tapes, eyeglasses, bikes, books and stuffed animals - among other things.  Find the answers in the How to Recycle ANYTHING in Baltimore guide. This on-line tool suggests local charities (where possible) that accept your hard-to-recycle items not normally collected in single-stream recycling.

This is a story about recycling, and how everything is politically charged this election season. My husband carried our newspapers - which, by the way, he believes are hopelessly in the bag for President Barack Obama - to the curb the night before the recycling truck was scheduled. He left them there, not in a recycling bin, but in the cute, little box I keep in the kitchen to hold them. Next morning, the men on the recycling truck took the newspapers - and my cute, little box - and I cursed them.

Vulgar recycling scofflaws could be banned from Anne Arundel County recycling centers under a proposed law introduced Tuesday. County Councilman John Grasso said he crafted the measure after county workers relayed tales of miscreants who responded with obscenities when asked to separate trash from cardboard. "I don't think it's fair that the employees should have to take abuse from the customers going in there," Grasso said. "If you came into any other business, and you start telling the employees to [expletive]

Throughout the day, shirtless, tattooed men push shopping carts filled with metal scrap to a junkyard in Curtis Bay. Inside the gate, a pair of German shepherds and 16 surveillance cameras keep watch as the men unload their treasure and leave with cash. Though small and tucked away, the scrap yard on Andard Avenue has prompted an outsized share of outrage. Neighbors complain that the business is encouraging thieves to steal metal from their homes at a time when the market for recycled metal is booming.

Baltimore County plans to borrow $25 million from its pension system to upgrade recycling facilities, a move some County Council members and union leaders are questioning. The county retirement system's board of trustees approved the loan last month at the request of County Executive Kevin Kamenetz's administration. In an interview Thursday, Kamenetz called the move prudent, saying it would serve both the retirement system and the county well. The county plans to borrow the money at an interest rate of 7.875 percent and repay it within 15 years.

(Tim Wheeler is away this week. The following is a guest post by Laurel Peltier, who publishes the down-to-earth "eco-glancer" www.greenlaurel.com ) Many Marylanders like to think of themselves as pretty green. But are we? If you peeked at curbside recycling rates, you may be surprised to find that we're a lighter shade of green than we thought.  When it comes to recycling, the state Department of the Environment says we're diverting 41 percent of our trash statewide from landfills and incinerators - well above the 34 percent national average, as figured by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Baltimore County residents are experiencing long delays in trash and recycling collection, and officials expect the wait to continue throughout this week. Storm-related power outages led residents to place "extremely large volumes of storm-related debris and spoiled foods" out for collection, the county said in a statement Monday. Officials also pointed to the July 4 collection holiday and hot working conditions as reasons for the delays. Officials advised residents to leave their materials out until collected.

Recycling is the right thing to do. By now, only the resentful, the slothful and people who want to abolish the Federal Reserve must feel otherwise. We're all supposed to remove junk mail, jugs, cans and bottles from the trash so that the paper, plastics, aluminum and glass from them might be used again. Americans lead the world in per-capita trash, so the more trash we recycle, the less we have to bury in landfills. That's the basic understanding. All but the cranky, the indolent and the tree-hugger-haters are well past acceptance of this idea.