Rachel Wagoner has been the director of CalRecycle for two years, but she has worked for two decades in environmental policy including time in the legislative office of the governor. She grew up as one of six children and her family had a strong waste-not-want-not ethic. She feels as though modern society has lost that sort of awareness even through something as simple as having wheels on our trash cans so we can easily move even heavy loads. The reality is that our society generates vast amounts of waste that goes to landfills – the equivalent of around 272 large trash bags per Californian per year.
of waste going to landfills like this one in San Juan Capistrano, California. (Photo by Mark Rightmire)MediaNews Group via Getty Images
The US has been striving to recycle some of this waste since the 1960s – take for instance the long-term slogan “its good for the bottle, its good for the can.” There was a major setback in…
