No white flag on trailer issue

A roving vessel is making its rounds on a mission to help make at least a small corner of the world a better place. Misbehaving “pirates” improperly board it, halting it from making any further progress. A stand-off of sorts ensues and the vessel remains out of service.

This sounds something like last month’s Maersk Alabama drama in which pirates operating on the high seas off the coast of Somalia boarded the large container ship as it was en route to delivering, among other things, relief supplies. But we’re actually talking here about Madison County’s mobile recycling trailer and events that took place in Banco, not Mogadishu.

On either May 6 or 7, someone filled one of the recycling trailer’s compartments with a tarp, trash and an air conditioner unit as it was parked in the lot at Route 670 and Route 231. This, county officials say, was just the latest in a series of improper dumping incidents involving the trailer, which is made to accept old glass, newspapers, aluminum cans and other recyclable items.

The trailer has, for years now, offered a needed convenience for Earth-friendly residents who don’t want to burn gas and time trekking all the way across the county to Shelby, where the county’s transfer station and main recycling containers are. Every week, county workers would rotate the trailer between three specially designated stops in the town of Madison and Banco.

The county’s mobile recycling trailer was yanked out of service the day the above-mentioned improper dumping was discovered and it has apparently stayed unavailable all this month since then. Officials are, in a sense, “surrendering” to “pirates” if they keep the recycling trailer unused.

In the case of the Maersk Alabama, U.S. forces didn’t immediately and rashly respond with their overwhelming might – doing so would have cost the life of the ship’s hostage, Capt. Richard Phillips. But the military didn’t raise a white flag of surrender either. After a few days, U.S. Navy SEALs snipers finally had clear shots on all three AK 47-weilding pirates guarding Capt. Phillips and simultaneously took them out. The captain was rescued unharmed.

The pirate threat continues off Somalia, but reports say diverse countries are now banding together with ships and manpower to help guard against it. Ships could just bypass Somalia’s coastline (and the pirates) by, say, sailing around Africa’s southern tip. But again, why raise the white surrender flag so easily, especially since making a bypass would be costly?

Madison County officials need not necessarily be so quick to raise the white flag. Of course we aren’t suggesting snipers as a solution, but why not more actively pursue other simple “pirate counter-measures” that have been suggested — like parking the trailer in areas where there are more people present, posting signs more clearly warning against dumping violations, using surveillance cameras or having sherifff’s deputies step up patrols around the trailer?

These days, more attention than ever is being focused on “going green” and recycling. It’s time to further lift up Madison County with more well-thought out game plans to enhance Earth-friendly efforts here. We hope officials won’t be so quick to raise the white flag on them.