For Peat’s Sake…Let’s Save the Wetlands!

Every spring, my husband designates a weekend for deep-cleaning and decluttering our house. I’m not looking forward to this. He will inevitably try to convince me to get rid of the life-sized paperboard cutout of Liberace that lives in our hall closet, and I will declare no — Liberace stays! We will scrub, sweep, dust, and polish. And while I’m not one of those people who enjoys cleaning, I find the seasonal ritual a little less onerous every spring, probably because our cleaning process itself has become greener with each passing year.

In October of 2000, I became the first person in my middle school to receive a cell phone. A gift from my grandmother, the Nokia had a little antenna and came with a set of four plastic Disney covers (Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, and Donald Duck, if memory serves). I mostly used the phone to call home and play Snake, a game in which you directed a little serpent towards an asterisk of food. As the snake grew and sped up, you had to keep it from bumping into itself, which would mean game over. Thinking back, I haven’t a clue what happened to the Nokia and its cases. Did I give them away or recycle them properly? Or did they just become part of a rising wave of electronic waste, growing as fast as the snake on the screen? 

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