Several of the Capital Region peace groups got together to have a big picnic and celebrate all the work we are doing together on the issue of pushing for world peace and bringing the troops back home. What was most impressive to me was the work activists did to encourage recycling and the reduction of waste for the picnic.

Before the picnic many of us planned to carpool and joined each other for the ride out to Grafton State Parks. We also were told to avoid disposable containers and think about how we reduced our waste. Yet we did more then that when we got to the picnic. We had special boxes put out for segregating all kinds of waste for proper disposal.

Compost. We had one box for composting paper plates, cups and food waste that could be shredded up and dumped in someone's compost pile. One could be cynical about that as waxed cups and plates wouldn't seem to biodegradable quickly, but shredding them apparently helps. Maybe one could burn them and use the ash for compost but that would reduce some of the nutrient value and create more pollution.

Recyclables. We also separated out plastic bottles and cans for recycling either as returnables or as commingled recyclables to be collected through municipal recycling. As simple as this seems, on too many special occasions recycling seems to just be forgotten about. It wasn't that much effort and it did conserve some materials.

Washables. There are a lot of disposable plastic silverware and even plastic cups that can be safely washed out and reused over and over again. Too often though people just throw that kind of stuff out. Disposable silverware is handy because it's a lot less of problem if you use lose it, but in many cases can be washed and reused many times.

Trash. Some things just didn't fall very well in those above categories such as LDPE containers that things like yogurt come in yet don't have much of a viable market for recycling in our area. Yet by asking individuals to take a few seconds out of the day to sort out their discards we dramatically cut on down on.

The reality is relatively few people take these kind of steps in their days to cut down on waste, but it seems that we made drastic reductions in our waste production. There was roughly 50 people at the picnic, yet only a small load of trash left over. The rest of the material isn't going to be dumped in a landfill or tossed in a fireplace and burnt, but will be turned into some kind of productive use one way or another.