Some clouds. Low 71F. Winds light and variable..

Some clouds. Low 71F. Winds light and variable.

Grace Christian Academy will host a cornerstone building dedication event for its new high school on Aug. 4.

The Williamson County Emergency Management Agency is looking for member organizations to be part of a new Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters (Williamson VOAD) group and participate in planning for and responding to future disasters that affect the county.  

Nashville native and former NBA and Brentwood Academy basketball player Brandan Wright branched out beyond his basketball career Wednesday to become a celebrity dentist for a day. 

PINEHURST, N.C. — Members of the Brentwood High School boys golf team traveled this week to Pinehurst, North Carolina, to take part in the NHSGA High School Golf National Invitational tournament at the famed Pinehurst Resort.

Nashville native and former NBA and Brentwood Academy basketball player Brandan Wright branched out beyond his basketball career Wednesday to become a celebrity dentist for a day. 

United Community Bank will celebrate its expansion into the Tennessee community on July 18 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at its recently opened branch in Brentwood at 1736 Carothers Parkway.

Nashville native and former NBA and Brentwood Academy basketball player Brandan Wright branched out beyond his basketball career Wednesday to become a celebrity dentist for a day. 

United Community Bank will celebrate its expansion into the Tennessee community on July 18 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at its recently opened branch in Brentwood at 1736 Carothers Parkway.

My grandfather was a farmer on Murray Lane in Brentwood. He never made a trip to a recycling center. His milk container was a cow. They lived comfortably with a hand-cranked milk separator. No electricity. They had a thunder mug in the bedroom and a two-hole’er 30 feet behind the house. Kitchen waste was “turned under” in the large vegetable garden or fed to the pigs. 

The United States Army even paid a visit. Because the terrain in Brentwood resembled Germany, they had maneuvers in his wheat field. Those guys packed up and were prepared for the Normandy beaches. Granddad said they left the field “clean as a whistle.” The expanded house is still there with brick veneer and a three-car garage. 

When you or I order a box of chocolate and it is delivered by Amazon Prime, this is what happens. They wrap each mouthful in two layers of paper, then a cardboard box, then stuff it into a padded double layer of plastic, put it in a truck which drives 3 miles one way to your house (think air pollution) and leave you with more throwaway than product (think recycling).  

The packaging industry is “doing it to US or for US.” At this time, our solution is to get the stuff “gone.” God has a very good plan called “dust to dust.” Nails rust, wood rots, water evaporates, feces enrich the soil and trees clean the air. Then, Adam and Eve stepped forward with plastic and packaging.  

At our house, we have a plan. We place empty horse grain bags in the smokehouse floor in a rack made of recycled wood pallets so as to sort 1. glass, 2. tin cans, 3. aluminum cans, 4. paper, 5. Small cardboard and 6. plastic. Oh, there is more! The nice silver metal cooking pot with lid holds kitchen waste that is then turned under the leaves for compost. From this, we produce the most rich, black dirt for the tomato garden. Now, to mention the unmentionable — garbage, which accumulates behind the white fence. Our garbage is dry and odorless. We have two families on the property, and we take the Dodge Ram 1500 to the Thompson’s Station (TS) convenience enter to drop recyclables, garbage along with limbs, waste from the wood shop and cardboard boxes.  

To empty our hands of our mess, we need an efficient organization. Ah ha! The government!?!? I have been told by a person who is in a position to know that we who go to the TS convenience center do not sort as well as those at Grassland. I am prepared to be offended. Apparently, a higher percentage of our TS trash exists in the recycling at TS. We do not sort as well. Oops …  

College Grove is worse. For all of us, I think this is true because we are under-informed. 

Let me tell you something I saw at the TS convenience center. A man stuffed a good-sized plastic table into the collection compactor for plastics. When the button was pushed, the machine jammed, and it took the attendants much effort to remove it. Proper items for the plastic container are plastic bottles and jugs. That’s it … bottles and jugs. Anything with a neck. Bottles and jugs account for 95% of plastic which passes through your household. The other 5% should go into your trash, even though it may be plastic. That 5% would never fill up a landfill. 

The worst product of all is the one we have the most of — the devil’s own creation — plastic grocery bags. We use more of them than anything else. I pick them up along the road in front of the house. They blow out of car windows. 

I have a solution. The county should place a tax of 50 cents per bag at all checkout counters, i.e., grocery, drug, hardware and fast food. We would either pay the tax or remember to bring a reusable bag from the car. Right now, these bags are polluting our rivers and oceans and jamming up recycling machines. That money would be used by the county for recycling expenses. 

To sort cardboard, there is a test. Tear the little thin boxes. If it is white throughout, it is paper. If the center is brown, it is cardboard. If it has a silver liner, it is trash. 

• Ice cream cartons are paper 

• Ice cream carton lids with plastic rims are trash 

• Rough-surface paper plates are paper 

• Shiny, stiff papers are paper 

At this time, only 10% of us sort and deliver to convenience centers. According to Wikipedia, we create 4.4 pounds of “stuff” per person, per day. One day, adjacent counties may stop being our dumping ground, so we may have to create a dump near your house. There are three landfills in Williamson County. I can take you to a nice spot on the west side of Nashville where I dumped my “stuff” in the 1960s and on. It was the official site. It is now a subdivision. The city of Franklin (population 240,000) has 14 convenience centers. My handheld calculator cannot multiply 240,000 times 4.4 pounds per day! 

Of the 132 pounds per month we each create, only 7 pounds are recycled. One step forward is to reduce the volume of packaging. Please help me with that! I am not one who likes government action to interfere with my life. BUT … 

Our local government and the state of Tennessee are looking at a partial solution. An excellent idea now floating around would be to set up accessible recycling collection sites near our busiest intersections where most of us travel for shopping and/or work. For example, in the center of Franklin, Cool Springs, Brentwood or Spring Hill, these sites would be classy and attractive. This would be storefront drops, not bins in the parking lot. As a result, the volume of recycling would increase, and garbage would be reduced. As is now done, you could continue to contract for pick up at your house. Footnote: garbage, metal and tree limbs would go to current convenience centers.

My interest on this subject was created years ago in one day. I was on a canoe trip with more than 50 fellow canoeists. This day was a “cleanup trip” on Nashville’s Mill Creek. Just below the Thompson Lane bridge, we found the body of a VW auto. The motor and drivetrain were gone. Can you imagine the difficulty of moving it with two canoes? We did! Anyway, we had arranged for a dump truck to haul away the items we collected. My recent such trips, including the Harpeth River through downtown Franklin, found conditions to be rather nice. I am glad to be able to say that. One good thing is the metal from that VW might be part of your new car. 

Why not eliminate all those cardboard boxes and plastic bottles on store shelves and replace them with glass bottles? It may be that we (the public) would be better served if there was a reusable glass container for mayonnaise that Kraft and other manufactures would use with a tin lid. Voila! Look at the volume of “stuff” we have just eliminated. A reusable jar and a recyclable lid! This could be done with many (if not all) products, such as ketchup, spices, juices, coffee, salt and broth. Why should they have to go through a chemical process to create packaging every time we decide to buy an item in a store? 

Open your refrigerator and look at the possibilities. Now, go to the grocery store pickle section and find the 24-ounce jar of Vlasic bread and butter chips (one of my favorites). The jar has a big mouth for easy access to the food. For the sake of this article, it would be easily rinsed.  

Go to your food pantry and see the possibilities, i.e., soup, broth, pink salmon, milk, green beans, mustard and seasonings. Go to your bathroom medicine cabinet and use your imagination. If a jar is broken, just melt it and shape it again. No chemicals needed. The bottles would be of a standard shape in many sizes, i.e., 1- or 2-gallon milk bottles, medicine bottles (all glass) of many sizes. Let’s call this “standardization.” We could deposit these bottles at our new collection site in the middle of town. They could be sent back to the product supplier for use again. 

On Jan. 17, 2022, Eastman (remember Kodak cameras?) of New York announced a $1 billion investment in France for a material-to-material molecular recycling facility. Currently, those (more crowded than we are) countries are burning it (air pollution). This Eastman process would create a plastic virgin-quality material with a significantly smaller carbon footprint. This is expected to be operational in 2025. 

I was informed that the new signage campaign at TS convenience center has caused an improvement in sorting. Now, we are as good as Grassland. Thanks to a signage program, the other collection centers, such as Bethesda, Chapel Hill, Southhall and Trinity, are doing better, too. 

Be advised that I truly am a capitalist, but sometimes, the ambition of a businessman is not in the best interest of this great nation. In a free society, it is best for the public to realize there is a problem, then a solution. Let’s be a part of the solution making things better for us all! The bottom line is, with personal initiative, we must recycle more and conserve our landfill space!

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