Signed, sealed, recycled
Bernie Zelazny wants to make the world a cleaner place, so he mails his recycling from Alpine to Austin
By Denise Gamino
Austin American-Statesman
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
ALPINE—Mail ‘em if you got ‘em.
These are words to live by if you are Bernie Zelazny. He’s an anti-dispose-all.
His efforts to save the planet take the concept of care packages to a new level. They are mass mailings with the emphasis on the mass. As in mounds of glass bottles. Pounds of plastic containers. And heaps of paperboard boxes and empty toilet paper tubes.
Zelazny’s life’s leftovers don’t go to the landfill. They go to the post office.
Destination: Austin.
Price: $28.92 for 48 pounds this time.
This is Brother Bernie’s Traveling Salvage Show (sorry, Neil Diamond).
Residents of this far West Texas town in the high desert Big Bend country have limited curbside recycling pickup. Alpine collects only aluminum cans, newspapers and office paper. So what’s a long-haired, hippie throwback like Zelazny to do with Jose Cuervo bottles drained of emotional lubricant? And those little metal thingies from broken windshield wipers on his 1983 Alfa Romeo with 423,000 miles?
Several times a year, he mails them 400 miles to a house in the Great Hills area of Northwest Austin. There, Elliott Zirkle, a friend of Zelazny’s, puts out the glass for curbside recycling. Then, Zirkle loads the plastic and paperboard into his Lexus and drives them to Ecology Action’s recycling center at Ninth Street and Interstate 35.
Rubbish rendezvous completed.
It is probably safe to say no one else buys one-way tickets at the post office for personal garbage.
“I don’t care what people think when I’m doing what I know is the right thing,” Zelazny says.
He is a self-employed computer consultant who moved to Alpine in 1994 after managing drug stores in Austin, where he lived for 18 years. Back in the ‘70s, he helped launch Ecology Action of Texas when it opened on Anderson Lane.
His philosophy: Leave a small footprint on the Earth.
He buys as little as possible, repairs his car and other people’s computers so new ones are not purchased, rides his bicycle most days and tries to avoid packaging that can’t be recycled. Styrofoam is his enemy. But he’s easygoing and doesn’t stop his girlfriend from bringing over her takeout coffee in Styrofoam cups.
“The less you can get by on,” he says, “the better for the planet, the better for the future of the kids who are following us.”
Zelazny is highly organized. His 500-square-foot apartment has a coat closet in the hall where he stores his cleaned and sorted trash in several boxes. (He owns three small trash cans for items he can’t recycle, but he needs to empty them only every few weeks.)
Mailing day goes like this:
Zelazny wears a green shirt from a thrift store, the latest in recycled fashion. Music from Austin’s KUT radio flows from the computer. Most of his chairs and lamps date to the ‘60s.
Zelazny grabs four empty boxes he got at the food co-op. He pulls out his tape and black marker. Out of the closet comes the garbage.
He packs glass first, carefully nesting each piece for a tight fit. “I try to avoid using glass as much as I can,” he says, “but you know how it is. You’ve got something you like and it comes in glass.”
And he likes Paul Newman’s salad dressing, Trappey’s peppers and Crystal Geyser ruby grapefruit drinks.
Next, he drops various plastic vitamin and supplement bottles into the big, plastic cat litter container. In go Nature’s Way fenu-thyme (combats nasal dryness), saw palmetto, garlic and ginkgo biloba.
Now it’s time for the smash-a-thon. He carries the plastics and tin cans downstairs to his apartment’s parking lot. He picks up a big rubber mallet and swings until his scraps are flat.
Back upstairs, he packs tin in one box, plastic in another, and batteries and paperboard in the last one.
It’s late afternoon, and the Alpine post office closes at 4 p.m. He carries the boxes down to his dusty Alfa Romeo, which sports—surprise!—a “Don’t Mess With Texas” bumper sticker.
At the post office, clerk Glenda Greenwood sees Zelazny coming. Alpine, population 6,000, is small enough that she knows customers by name. She knows he’s mailing rubbish and shows a bemused smile. But she treats him with as much respect as she shows the others in line.
She weighs each box and asks if he wants insurance. He buys some for the box of glass.
Greenwood: What else for you today?
Zelazny: That’s it.
Greenwood: OK. Twenty-eight, ninety two.
Zelazny: Oh, I’m getting off cheap.
Outside on the sidewalk, Zelazny says he doesn’t mind spending money to recycle. Alpine homeowners pay $30 a year for curbside recycling and Zelazny, an apartment dweller, doesn’t have to pay that.
“I will spend more money to continue to do something for the environment,” he says. “It costs more to do the right thing. The easy thing to do is not change and just be a consumer and not worry about it.”
Three days later, Zelazny’s castaways land on the doorstep of Zirkle’s house. But one box is missing. For a week, it lived a vagabond life, threatening to turn into the legendary garbage barge from New York that floated the world’s oceans looking for a home in the 1980s.
And then it showed up.
The last of Bernie Zelazny’s junk mail. Rubbish in search of reincarnation.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Posted by: Paul on May 31, 2005 at 10:09:46