Since the mid-1990s when recycling programs were instituted in Harford County – and many other places across Maryland and elsewhere in the United States – separating glass, metal and paper from the garbage has become kind of second nature to most people.
On the whole, people in Harford County – not to mention much of the rest of the country – have taken to sorting materials that can be recycled from the rest of the garbage.
Indeed, getting Americans to recycle appeals to a certain cultural instinct for thrift. Scouts and other organizations had no trouble getting vast numbers of people to save old newspapers for recycling drives. The collecting organization earned money, and the people who saved the old papers presumably got a bit of satisfaction.
During World War II, recycling was practiced as part of the homefront effort to win. Possibly it is the residual wartime effort that made the 1970s recycling efforts so easy to coordinate.
Of course, there was also a financial incentive in the 1970s. There were tax breaks and other incentives offered to firms that recycled old paper, helping to create a market for what would otherwise be trash.
Those incentives largely vanished in the 1980s, but were renewed, at least to some extent, in the 1990s with the establishment of curbside recycling programs like the one put in place for much of Harford County.
Given this background, and the general success of the county's largely voluntary curbside program, it seems odd that only last week did the Harford County Council enact legislation that will require owners of apartment buildings to offer recycling containers for their tenants. (Reasonably, a provision that would have required building owners to keep track of recycling and garbage was excised from the final version of the legislation.)
It seemed equally odd to attend outdoor public gatherings where bottles or cans of soda or other drinks are offered, yet the only place to dispose of the empties is with the regular garbage.
That will change, too, because under the same legislation, organizers of various festivals and other large scale public gatherings will be obliged to provide recycling bins for their patrons.
On the whole, Harford's recycling legislation was a long time coming, but it's better late than never.