Corporate polluter: The Hartford Courant

I felt sick this morning to find that the oh-so-sanctimonious Hartford Courant had seen fit to seal a square of plastic across a portion of its front page in order to attach yet another annoying ad, this time for a Berlin “active adult” development. Much as I hate front page ads like this — it sure proves how desperate newspapers are to make money — today’s is a new low. In recent months, they’ve put Post-It note ads, which are at least removeable, though still ridiculous.

But by sealing a piece of plastic onto the front page, they have effectively turned a paper that can be recycled safely and efficiently into one that harms the environment. It is short-sighted and the move of an awful corporate citizen to attach permanently these plastic squares to a newspaper. It’s an environmental travesty, a screw-you to every subscriber who cares about our planet.

I hope that every municipality and green group in Connecticut will speak out against this change before it becomes accepted practice.

Perhaps the Courant’s publisher might want to read its editorials sometimes. Live up to your own ideals, Courant, or the shut the hell up.

RIP Garbage picking in West Hartford

It hit me the other day as I watched two men in a station wagon cruising slowly down the street, inspecting the assorted trash outside everybody’s house, that when the town switches over to the new barrel system this fall, one of the town’s long-standing traditions will die.

If the only stuff that trash collectors will pick up is whatever we can cram in the barrel for the one-armed trucks to lift, dump and return to the curb empty, then there’s no place anymore for putting old Playschool climbing toys on the side of the road, or aging tv sets with “IT WORKS” signs taped on the tubes, or boxes of odds and ends from the basement. They either get tossed in the can or hauled off to …. well, I’m not sure.

What I do know is that I probably won’t be trying to lug an old bookshelf home that my neighbor down the block no longer wants. I’ll just see neat rows of big trash cans, with nothing to differentiate one from the other except perhaps whether the lids are firmly closed or propped up a bit by that final bag of kitchen litter.

I imagine this change will have quite an impact on the stores throughout the area that sell used goods and for the people who take out trash to flea markets.

What it really does, I’m afraid, is to push us a little further towards becoming the throw-away society we all loathe, even as embrace its ethos day in and day out. What’s old and unwanted simply disappears. It never even makes a pit stop by the side of the road, where a hope of new life still exists.