Remember those newspaper drives we used to have in school? I don't know why, but the memory of it popped into my head today and I finally figured out what they were for! Maybe my brain has been working on this problem for the past 20 years, and only just now made heads or tails of it. I googled to make sure that my understanding is correct. So, apparently, the idea for newspaper drives is to increase recycling. For some reason, I just never caught onto that one.From what I remember, the instructions were to bring old newspapers from home. But, we never had any newspapers at home. We just weren't the newspaper reading type of family. So, everytime there was a newspaper drive, either Ca Loc or Wah Toh would have to scramble the day before to buy a bunch of newspapers, which means that the newspapers I brought were never old and all of them were always of the same exact edition.
I just now asked Mr. Nonny Nu and, apparently, you aren't supposed to buy the papers. You're just supposed to bring the old stuff that is laying around the house. I wonder if it's a Chinese thing--did you guys have to buy newspapers for your school newspaper drives?
The newspaper drives weren't really designed to encourage recycling so much as they were fundraisers. Way back when, recycling wasn't widespread, and the one real area where recycled paper was used was in newsprint.
ReplyDeleteSchools often signed up and got paid by the pound for old newspaper. So American families would save their newspapers in stacks (or wait for the pack rat on the street to die) yearning for the day that the schools asked for them.
A side effect is that it encouraged recycling. But it was really for the dough -- now that's American!
Oh, I see! So, we should have just given the school the money that we spent to buy the newspapers...*sigh*
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