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Published Wednesday, July 02, 2008 at 10:07 AM

Recycle this!

By Lynne Finnerty

People who don’t have much money to waste are the ultimate recyclers—unwitting pioneers of green living.

A lot of folks who grew up when mayonnaise only came in glass jars saw their moms or aunts or grandmothers remove the labels and reuse the jars for canning vegetables. The Mason lid fit, so why throw away a perfectly good jar?

Some of these same folks would maybe get accused of being rednecks for having junk lying around. But they would be the first to fish out the part that would fix your car or tractor right up, because that part isn’t made anymore and they’ve never thrown theirs away.

Ever drink iced tea out of a jelly jar? It tastes just as good that way as in a crystal highball.

When dad’s T-shirts wore out, they weren’t tossed in the trash can. They were ripped into cleaning rags, good for a variety of jobs around the house. Mom’s old stockings: perfect for tying up tomato plants in the garden. Large plastic ice cream containers: great for storing bulk quantities of flour, sugar, cornmeal and the like.

Back when flour came in large, pretty cotton calico sacks, women used the material to make all kinds of things, from skirts to potholders to aprons to quilting squares.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle” wasn’t a slogan to country folks. It was a way of life.

Farmers, out of necessity, know a thing or two about conserving resources. They buy in bulk to save trips to town. They may even team up to buy a large quantity of what they need and get a better price. That’s how co-ops got started, after all.

Farmers love shiny new tractors, but they’ll make the old one run as long as they can. With fertilizer costing about three times as much as it did a couple of years ago, they work hard not to over-apply it.

Since the Great Depression, Americans in general have become more prosperous, more time-strapped and more interested in convenience, and we’ve become a throw-away society. Now, through greater environmental awareness, we’re starting to turn that around.

Recycling is cool now. People who haven’t had to reduce and reuse due to the penny pinching imperative have gotten onto the bandwagon to help conserve our natural resources. The waste recycling rate has increased from 6.4 percent in 1960 to 32.5 percent in 2006, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Since 2000, per capita waste generation has leveled off at 4.6 pounds of garbage per person per day.

Today’s focus on green living is great. But, let’s not forget that necessity is the mother of invention, and farmers and a lot of other country folks were recycling before recycling was cool.

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Lynne Finnerty is the editor of FBNews, a publication of the American Farm Bureau Federation.