Hope you had a great holiday yesterday. My turkey dinner came out very tasty and worth doing. Now we have lovely left-overs.

I just watched a documentary about the evils of plastics in our environment. We're all aware that one-use products are filling up our landfills and many are finding their way to the oceans. They showed a dead albatross on Midway Island - long-dead, just some bones and feathers, but inside that circle of animal matter was about 1/2 gallon of plastic bottle caps, fragments of plastic bags, and other plastic stuff. I mean, you could just pick up handfuls of it. And it's not all from boats. Stuff from the middle of the country finds its way into waterways via storm drains, and can end up in the sea.



These are glass bottles at my uncle's trading post in southwest Colorado. The pile was about 4 or 5 feet high at its peak.



It grew over the years, and is on the decline. Cold pop is a big seller out there in the desert on the way to somewhere else, probably their biggest seller.

Back in the 1950s, pop came in refillable glass bottles. The bottom of each Coke bottle had the name of the bottling plant where it originated and the oil drilling rough necks used to place bets over whose bottle came from further away. At that time, the only thing getting dumped out by the driveway was the bottle caps. Sometimes I imagine mining that site for some of those classic old caps.



Then, my granddad started selling Yoo-hoo (that chocolate-flavored beverage) in little 6 ounce cans. That was back before recycling, so he dumped those cans on the pile, joined by any pop bottles that weren't refillable - the brands other than Coke in some cases.



In the 1980s, the refillable pop bottles were replaced by one-use glass bottles, and they threw them on the pile. If some tourist came into the trading post asking a lot of nosy questions, my granddad would point out that they could take the bottle with them.

One time a retired commercial airline pilot came to the store and said he had to come find what was making that gleam on the ground - he used it for a landmark while flying cross country.


They don't have trash service there. Their landfill is a bluff on the edge of the farm yard. Yes, it's an ecological nightmare, but that is the reality of the life of people out in the sticks. Every car they ever owned is parked in their yard.



Things have gotten better, though, because my Uncle Robert, who inherited the store, now stocks pop in recyclable cans, and he actually saves them for recycling. He's got someone to take them to the recycler. So the bottle pile is settling into the dust for now.









More About the History of Coke Bottles

Anyhow, no more plastic grocery bags for me.