Memphians don't recycle. That's a fact. When you come across a Memphian who recycles, it's like stumbling across a Trump supporter with a soul.
I used to recycle. That was before I became a Memphian. When I first moved to Memphis, back in 2014, I unloaded my mini-van, unpacked my boxes, deconstructed them, and dragged them out to the dumpster (singular).
"Uhm, excuse me," I asked a fellow resident, "Where's does the recycling go?"
"Oh," she said, "You have to drive it out to the recycling center."
"The what?"
"The recycling center. It's in Midtown. Maybe two miles or so that way," she gestured in the opposite direction.
I nodded. For the next two weeks, my roommate and I collected our glass, metal and plastic in paper bags on the floor of our kitchen. And yes, it did stink.
"Why do you guys have trash on your floor?" a guest asked me one afternoon.
"It's. Not. Trash," I replied, exasperated.
Every other week, my roommate or I would drive the 2-3 bags to the recycling center and unload our empty yogurt containers and beer bottles.
"Your car kind of smells like trash," my sister commented.
"That's because there's trash--I mean recycling. There's recycling in the back."
This went on for about three months. Then I gave up.
At a certain point, the extra drives, the unsightly pile in the kitchen, the odor--it all became too much. I began to resent the city council that made it so convenient to waste and so inconvenient to recycle. After all, that's the government's job, isn't it? To make it hard to do the wrong thing and easy to do the right thing?
Herein lies the question at the heart of my grievance. Does the government have the right to legislate acts of good citizenship? Many Americans would say no. But most socialists would say yes.
In Ontario, for instance, recycling isn't just convenient--it's mandatory. In my parents' home in Guelph, all waste gets sorted into three transparent bags. The green bag is for compost, the blue for recycling, and clear bag for trash. Trash is only collected on a bi-weekly basis, while recycling and compost are collected weekly. The transparency of the bags allows waste-collectors to easily monitor a household's compliance. And if, for some reason, your household is not compliant, you'll receive what my mother calls "the yellow tag of shame," a formal notice that you've failed to perform your civic duty of trash sorting.
And that's not the only thing the government regulates; from the amount of milk a dairy farmer can produce and sell, to the time of day you can wash your clothes, everything is controlled. The Government of Ontario, in fact, is the sole proprietor of liquor in the provence. Laissez faire? No. But it does allow the government to collect taxes on something it's deemed a luxury item.
Now I realize that in a country where personal freedoms reign supreme, this type of regulation probably wouldn't fly.
But at the very least, Memphis, enable your citizens to do the right thing. Millennials are becoming increasingly environmentally aware. If you want to continue to attract innovators and community leaders, make Memphis a place where you don't have to drive four miles out of your way to prevent your empties from ending up in a landfill.
