John Szalasny

Last week’s press release may site an underutilized, aging facility and high operations costs as the reasons for the upcoming closure of the Cascades container mill in Niagara Falls but the timing for this announcement is too close to the end of the NYS Legislative session to be coincidental. The company is the leading regional processor of recycled-content container board, and the announcement comes days after the failure of the Legislature to fix the problems with recycling in the State.

The reason we have a problem with plastic can be explained with the principles of compound interest. As many of us learned as a child, if a penny doubles every day for 30 days, you will be a multi-millionaire. The lesser-known version of the story involves of the origins of chess. The game was presented to the emperor. Impressed by the gift, he grants the inventor his request for what appears to be a token reward.

It may be the times we live in. Just before settling in to write my annual Earth Day article, I was in a creative writing workshop and given a prompt about springtime. It turned it into “Springtime flowers for a post-apocalyptic Earth Day.”  As I am not a fan of the genre, I was surprised at how easily the story flowed from the keyboard, which made me work harder to show that there is hope as we commemorate Earth Day in 2025.