Is Your Neighbor Saving the World?

Your neighbors might be saving the world and you might not even know it. Sadly, my familiarity with my own neighbors is pretty poor, so much so that although I’ve long been glad for my neighbor’s recycling sign, she didn’t know it until recently when I talked to her about her role as community remindarian.

We do curbside recycling where I live, and every other week the recycling trucks come. If a person isn’t mindful, it’s easy come trash time to lose track of whether it’s also the week to schlep the recycling out. Throw in holidays and things get more confusing still.

But one of my neighbors, Ronit Bryant, regularly puts out her beacon. The sign is small – not more than two by three feet – with two metal rods for legs. It announces simply: “Recycling Pickup Tomorrow,” complete with a cheerful exclamation mark. Since I pass Bryant’s house often enough, her reminders have saved me many times from either unsightly paper and bottle build-up or that slippered dash to catch the truck in the morning.

Bryant’s home is rightly described as artistic, so it was easy for me to imagine that the creative, conscientious person living within had made the sign him or herself, and independently took the incentive to keep the rest of us in the recycling know. I learned that was not quite the case.

The sign was given to Bryant when she signed up to be a recycling leader in the community, as part of the city of Mountain View, California’s recycling program. When the recycling program began here in the mid-1990s, recycling leaders were the intermediaries between residents and local government, providing feedback to the city on what the residents thought.

The recycling leaders also disseminated information to their neighbors on what was recyclable, and reminded others that recycling day was approaching with their signs. With pickup every other week, “it was hard to remember,” recalls Cynthia Palacio, senior analyst in solid waste and recycling for the city of Mountain View. Over the years this method of information exchange was supplanted, and although there are still recycling signs left that residents can request, the leadership program is not vigorously campaigned. “Everybody’s pretty used to the schedule now,” said Lori Topley, city of Mountain View solid waste manager.

Bryant enlisted to become a recycling leader after seeing a similar sign on nearby street soon after the program started. “It sounded like a good idea,” she said, and pointed out that since it’s important to recycle as much as we can, it can’t hurt to be reminded. As for herself, she doesn’t believe she’s forgotten to put out the word about recycling day. “I check every week,” she said. It is part of her overall commitment to be active in the community where she’s lived for the past 24 years, and where she serves on the city council. “I put a sign out to remember to vote for elections,” she added.

The recycling leaders started with 29 members in 1995 and peaked with 122 members in 1999, according to Palacio. And now that number looks in my sampled area to be closer to zero: indeed, I have noticed only one, and that is Bryant. I’m thankful for her reminders that get my carts out to the curb so that what’s within can really be recycling. So to Ms. Bryant, and others like her who on a local level help us to keep our good intentions active: thank you!

Photo: Patricia Castillo, former Councilmember, poses with one of the fabulous recycling signs circa 1995, at the start of the Mountain View Recycling Leaders program (File photo, courtesy of Cynthia Palacio, Mountain View Department of Public Works)