The war on recycling

By Elaine Owsley
Guest Writer

Today I parked in front of a stand of milkweed. The pods were beginning to open and the seeds, like giant dandelion fluff, were beginning to escape.
During World War II, we kids roamed the allies and the railroad right-of-ways gathering up milkweed pods at this time of year. They went to manufacturers who packed the seed fluff into float jackets for airmen. Before the days of synthetics, that's what they used for flotation aid.

We were all so well trained –– collecting metals, paper, etc., and when the war was over they said, "Ok, you don't have to do that any more.” Think of all the recyclables we could have processed and all of the energy saved if we'd continued. It’s kind of short sighted.

Someone would come to the schools and pick up the paper bags (since plastic wasn't around) on a special day. We had enormous paper drives, and the metal drives included things like the tinfoil that wrapped pieces of gum and cigarette packages.
The toothpaste tubes were made of some kind of bendable, rollable metal, and those were collected, too.

Coffee cans, any kind of food cans, oil cans, old metal stuff, whatever you could find –– usually in the alleys –– were all collected, and semi-trucks would make the rounds and pick the items up. There were five or six schools in our part of town in about a five-mile radius, so doing the pickup part was a big deal.

We would win arm patches if we brought in whatever it was being collected. I think I still have mine around here somewhere. Our mothers would sew them on our snowsuit or jacket sleeves.

We also brought in the cuffs from our father's suits –– they were changing over to cuffless pants –– and they were gathered up and taken to women who would make quilts out of them for the veteran's hospitals. My mother belonged to a group that rolled bandages for the Red Cross. We saved our used cooking oil and Crisco that had been used for cooking, strained it and saved it to be taken off and used for something that had to do with the war.

Once, I remember the grocery store had a day when you could buy a can of Crisco without a token, if you brought in a can of saved grease. The lady across the street used it to make soap, adding lye, probably, so maybe that's what the grease was used for.

There were bunches of things that weren't available, but we managed to survive. Amazing how puny our little "sacrifices" are today, isn't it? But I don't recall that anyone really felt they were put upon to save, gather, and contribute –– from elementary schools on up.

It's sad, really, that all that training has gone with the years. We all felt part of something big and important –– in this case the war effort.
What if we could fire up that feeling again? What if we could be part of the energy effort, or "earth effort,” or "sustainability effort"?
What if kids could brag that their school collected more paper than another school?

I don't think we've lost the ability to do these things. I think we've just lost the group feeling of purpose. A single-mindedness about our planet and its needs, instead of just our own, is what's needed. We did it before, as the wartime song said, and we can do it again.