Newspaper Page Text
OPINION
THE CHAMPION, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17-23, 2019 • Page 5
Too much Southern hospitality
Hours prior to Game 5 of the
Atlanta Braves National League
playoff series against the St. Louis
Cardinals, the Braves organization
announced they would not hand out
the familiar red foam tomahawks
that have been part of the Braves
experience for decades because
Cardinals pitcher Ryan Helsley
complained about the familiar tribal
chant that is played at Braves games
to entice fans to show their support
of the home team.
This is taking the concept of
Southern hospitality a bit too far, in
my opinion.
Helsley, who claims to be
a member of the Cherokee
Nation, told The St. Louis Post-
Dispatch that the chant is “a
misrepresentation of the Cherokee
people or Native Americans in
general.”
My DNA profile shows that
I am a combination of European
and Native American ancestry. I
am proud of my heritage and can’t
begin to imagine how anyone with
Native ancestry would feel offended
by actions that have no evil intent
and cause no harm to anyone unless
they choose to allow themselves to
be offended.
I’m not offended by the Kansas
City Chiefs, the Cleveland Indians
or Florida State’s Seminoles, but
rather see the naming of powerful
sports teams as a compliment to
native cultures.
My DNA is, however,
overwhelmingly British/Irish. It
doesn’t bother me in the least that
Notre Dame’s football team is
referred to as the Fighting Irish.
And, if I were offended by it, what
right do I have to attempt to curtail
the actions of others just because I
don’t agree?
Helsley also said the familiar
chant depicts Native Americans “in
this kind of caveman-type people
way who aren’t intellectual. They
are a lot more than that.” Say what?
Note that Helsley did not say “'We’
are a lot more than that”, but,
referred to Native Americans as
“they.”
I can’t understand what is
“caveman” about a chant? Chants
are used in Catholic, Hindu and
Jewish religious ceremonies and
have been for hundreds of years.
Chants are also used by many sports
teams as means of encouraging
crowd and teammate support as
well as by many fraternities and
sororities.
It angers me to know that one
individual’s opinion can have such
a tremendous impact on others. It
is safe to assume that most of us
would not want to intentionally
offend or hurt another human, but in
the world of sports there will always
be a winner and a loser. To the
victor, go the spoils.
Not only did the Cardinals take
away our tomahawks and chant,
they spanked the Braves. That is
offensive!
“You need to have a market,
and that’s what we lost with China, ”
said Anne Germain, VP of technical
and regulator affairs for National
Waste and Recycling Association, as
reported September 9, 2019 in The
Wall Street Journal.
I began recycling first with
newspapers during elementary
school paper drives—made sense as
our family was also in the newspaper
business and public pressure was
growing on publishers to use
recycled stock. By college, I had
added collecting empty aluminum
cans to my recycling habits; I was
a broke college kid and at peak,
recycling centers were paying
around 33 cents a pound.
Those realities have shifted
substantially though, and in just
the past two years, markets for the
bulk of recyclable commodities
have all but collapsed. You may still
be sorting, separating and placing
recyclables in your blue bin at home,
but there is a more than a decent
chance that a healthy portion of that
once recyclable waste stream is now
heading straight to a landfill.
More than a generation ago,
China was a fast-developing country
in need of multiple types of raw
materials that it was unable to
manufacture in sufficient supply
on its own. Already a massive net
exporter, the Chinese government
and shippers realized they had
thousands of empty cargo containers
Realities of recycling
‘One Man's
Opinion 9
Bill Crane
bill.csicrane@gmail.com
in the United States and elsewhere
in the Western world about to be
shipped back to China. Buying
discarded metals, plastics, paper
and glass for a pittance and filling
those empty containers that had to
be shipped back anyway was an
inexpensive solution to producing
more raw materials.
As late as 2017, the U.S.
exported roughly 14.5 million
metric tons of recycled waste to
China. China announced in 2017 that
beginning in 2018 it would no longer
accept many kinds of waste. During
the phase-down in 2018, China still
accepted 9.4 million metric tons, but
only a fraction of that tonnage so far
in 2019.
Recycled commodity markets
have collapsed. Mixed paper was
going for $67 a metric ton as late
as August of 2017. The current
price for the city, county or state
government seeking to dispose of
the paper is $2 per metric ton.
While many municipalities here
and elsewhere consider banning
single-use plastics altogether,
consider your community without
pooper scoop baggies, your local
newspaper sitting on the lawn
soaked in a light rain without a
delivery bag or remembering to
carry bags/boxes on every shopping
trip.
A good bit of single-use plastics
came about for product safety
reasons, the interior lid/sealant on
most food products, the plastic wrap
around virtually every over-the
counter drug (a result of the Tylenol
tampering scare of the 1980s), these
plastics can be removed, but are we
willing to sacrifice those protections
and assurances of some degree of
product safety?
Illegal dumping also remains
a problem, particularly and often
in lower income communities. The
ingenuity of American industry
should be incented here to do more.
Most tire rubber can be
granulized into rubber, then used for
playground and other recreational
surfaces, or perhaps as a roadway
substrate. Coal ash—a by-product
of burning coal for energy—is
toxic and filled with heavy metals
similar to mercury. Coal ash could
potentially be used as a low-cost
road patching material as well as
mixed with traditional asphalt (a
petroleum-based product) and if a
rubber liner (made from tires) was
under that same roadbed, there
would be much less opportunity
for leaching into any nearby
underground aquifer.
The Chinese still incinerate our
old unusable trash as a fuel source,
but there are plenty of air quality
concerns with that approach. As it
continues to reduce its waste product
footprint, the Coca-Cola Company
developed a partnership a couple of
decades ago to turn its waste plastic
bottles into carpet fiber.
More carpet is now produced
with polyesters and similar recycled
plastic fibers than wool. However
only about 9 percent of all plastics
are currently being recycled. Nearly
eight million metric tons of plastic
waste are seeping and creeping
into the world’s oceans every
year. Depending on where your fish
and shellfish are caught, you are
probably now occasionally eating
some micro-bits of that plastic
waste.
Not exactly an appetizing
thought but choking on our own
waste never is. We can’t look the
other way anymore, with China out
of the mix, our trash is here to stay;
let’s figure out more ways to again
turn that trash back in to treasure.
Bill Crane also serves as a
political analyst and commentator
for Channel 2 ,’v Action News, WSB-
AMNews/Talk 750 and now 95.5
FM, as well as a columnist for The
Champion, DeKalb Free Press and
Georgia Trend. Crane is a DeKalb
native and business owner, living
in Scottdale. You can reach him
or comment on a column at bill.
csicrane@gmail. com.
