A Brown Study
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CALL FOR PAPERS
2006 MRS FALL MEETING www.mrs.org/fall2006/ ABSTRACT DEADLINE: JUNE 20, 2006
POSTERMINARIES
A Brown Study My favorite domestic product is undoubtedly bleach. Is your coffee mug looking stained? Simple washing doesn’t clean it? Just add a dash of bleach, leave for a few minutes, and rinse. Is the shower cubicle beginning to collect those inevitable black lines of mold? Brush bleach on, walk away, run the shower again later, and it’s all gone. I could go on, but I won’t, because this is not a commercial for household products—it’s about recycling. In many countries, it is now the practice to separate our trash, most of which is packaging, into four or five different containers. In my household, we sort into glass, paper, plastics and metal, garden waste, and “the rest.” Modern standards for house design are beginning to specify that every new dwelling should have space for at least five trash containers. This would entail a complete redesign of our apartment, in which the kitchen is already festooned with plastic bags containing other plastic bags, and rows of bottles waiting to be carried individually to their public collection point. Although recycling has caught the public imagination as a self-evidently good thing, has anyone given enough consideration to the difficult issues it raises in a thoughtful household? How much time is being wasted while we, perplexed, stand in front of the five containers holding a piece of packaging in which plastic and paper are permanently welded together. Where to put it? What about those wonderful confectionary wrappers which are metallic on one side and paper on the other? My father once bet me five bob that I could not separate the two layers. It took me half an hour, but I did it— perhaps that’s the point at which I committed to becoming an engineer. Five bob, by the way, was five English shillings, now known as 25p, or less than 50¢. In the 1960s, that would be enough to buy a new piece of rolling stock for my model railway (another marker on the way to geekdom and engineering). 432
A further dilemma is whether to wash the items to be thrown away. Which is the minimum-energy way forward? What is the cost of the mental anguish of a tidy person contemplating putting a plastic container in the proper bin while it still contains substantial traces of coleslaw?
Although recycling has caught the public imagination as a selfevidently good thing, has anyone given enough consideration to the difficult issues it raises in a thoughtful household? Bottles represent further anguish. Until recently, we were encouraged to separately file these as clear, green, or brown, resulting in hesitation—potentially extending to tension headaches—over the very pale-tinted ones, or those blue overpriced water bottles. More recently, a touch of intellectual honesty has emerged, recognizing the fact that it is virtually impossible to imagine that color purity could be maintained in public bottle banks. Last week, our three neighborhood bottle banks were all over-painted with the sloga
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