I asked Michelle Peterson at the counter of the Intermountain Steel recycling center if the staff had anything special planned for Saturday.

Michelle looked at me with a blank stare."What's Saturday?" she asked, as a pickup truck full of old washers, refrigerators and other household appliances long past their prime pulled up onto the scales just outside.

At Greenpeace and the Sierra Club and other enviro organizations worldwide, they're planning all-day celebrations and commemorations for Saturday, a.k.a. Earth Day 2000.

At the Intermountain Steel recycling center, they're planning on business as usual.

English translation: 40 cents a pound for your aluminum cans, two or three dollars for your refrigerators, washers and dryers, and if you want to drop off your old car, they'll give you $44, no questions asked.

Everybody gets a little green.

At Intermountain Steel, every day is Earth Day.

If you squint, it's a beautiful sight.

Beyond the crumpled Buicks and Toyotas and flattened out Peterbilts, beyond the scrap heaps of Kelvinators and Kenmores and Maytags, beyond the crunched railroad cars and airplanes and the ten thousand smashed cans of Mountain Dew and Diet Coke, there it is: the cycle of life.

Proof positive. What goes around comes around.

One day it's your old yellow Dodge Charger killing the grass in the front yard. The next it's going through the car shredder and turning back into the metal from whence it began.

Cars don't die, they go to the recycling yard and get reincarnated.

A Hyundai might become a Rolls Royce in its next life, or a Land Rover, or maybe not another car at all but a piece of rebar or the truss for a basketball arena.

It also might be turned into another Hyundai.

Do you sometimes think we don't give ourselves enough credit?

Especially on Earth Day?

Reports come in from around the globe of impending doom, of the diminishing ozone layer, of shrinking rain forests, of polluted rivers, of dirty air and poisonous chemicals. Sobering situations to ponder, no question.

But in other ways, we've never been better caretakers of the planet. We burn cleaner fuel, we try our best to protect wildlife and wilderness, we glare at people who litter, and if we do say so ourselves, we've gotten really good at recycling.

We take our wasted, burned-out, busted, good-for-nothing-anymore junk and turn it back into raw material so it can be usable again and eventually turn back into junk.

At places like Intermountain Steel on 400 South and 900 West in Salt Lake and thousands others like it here and everywhere, it happens every day.

The parade never stops. On an average day, Michelle told me, Intermountain alone will take in about 100 pounds of aluminum cans, 845 pounds of cast aluminum (car rims, etc.), 1,500 pounds of copper, 250 tons of iron, 325 pounds of radiators and at least 25 cars.

They don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, of course. They do it to pay the rent.

But in a nice, tidy, capitalistic kind of way, they help pay the rent for all of us.

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So if you're wondering how to celebrate Earth Day tomorrow, might I suggest a cruise through the west side, past the industrial parks, to the commercial recycling centers of your choice?

First, toast 'em with an aluminum can -- and then sell it to them.

Your mother will appreciate it.

Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.

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