You know, it is remarkable how wasteful our society has become. As part of our society, I myself am pretty wasteful, but I do try to be more aware of how much electricity, gas, water, and oil I use and what my impact is on the planet.
Sometimes, it seems like people are so unaware of what they’re wasting. For instance: why do we use oil and gasoline to power engines to blow leaves off sidewalks? Now, I’m not an old guy, but I am old enough to say “I remember when we used a gadget called a rake or a broom to clear sidewalks and lawns of leaves.”
Instead of raking leaves into neat piles for kids to jump in, today we have guys out there with loud combustion engines blowing the leaves off lawns and sidewalks into the street, blowing them all about and still having to rake them to get them into a neat pile.
What examples of conspicuous waste have you seen lately?
Ohh, I so agree about the leaf blowers. The other thing that gets me is people hosing down their driveways and sidewalks. And downtown, you see building housekeeping people hose off the entire sidewalk area every morning. What a huge waste of water. And in the summer when it’s hot, that water evaoprates and creates even more muggy, unpleasant air.
And maybe if people actually did a little more physical activity rather than just stand there…
Ditto on the leaf blower thang. I still sweep my sidewalk with a *real broom* after mowing, and feel like a nostalgic, senile 80-year-old for doing so.
My biggest complaint of waste is the common and simple practice of turf maintenance: we water it to make it grow, then we cut it off. Then we bag it and pay for someone to take away. How freaking stupid is that?
*End of Master-Gardener-in-Training-Rant*
Q-What examples of conspicuous waste have you seen lately?
A- My vote.