Bob Kochtitzky

by Adam Lynch
Photo by William Patrick Butler
April 19, 2006

Bob Kochtitzky, director of Mississippi 2020, has the gift of foresight. He can pick out warning signs years before the rest of society catches on, and he figured out ages ago that sustainable living is a necessity if the planet is still going to be usable far into the future. The hard part, Kochtitzky will tell you, is convincing everybody else.

"Before I started the recycling program around Northside Drive, there was no recycling anywhere in the city, and not much to find anywhere else in the state, either," Kochtitzky, 77, said.

Mississippi 2020 is a nonprofit organization that still promotes recycling and sustainable living. The recycling program Kochtitzky began in the 1980s, with the help of local product recyclers in the Jackson area, was eventually adopted by the city itself in 1985, leaving him free to focus on other things.

"By then the recycling effort was so huge I actually welcomed the city taking it off my hands," he says, but adds that it pained him that the city dropped its glass recycling effort soon after. Today the city collects plastic bottles, newspapers, aluminum, cardboard, steel cans, and even catalogs, but no glass.

Rainbow Whole Foods is now a drop-off site for the city's only glass-recycling program.

Mississippi 2020 has tried to trickle environmental awareness into a little of everything and convince the rest of the country that environmentalism and capitalism do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Recently, the nonprofit worked with Habitat for Humanity to build an eco-friendly house in West Jackson, combining recycled goods with efficient heating and cooling to keep costs to a minimum.

Kochtitzky's biggest enemy, however, is indifference. "The woman who lives in that house hasn't given us copies of her power and electric bills to prove the efficiency of the home," Kochtitzky says, "nor does she keep the extensive backyard garden we built for her up. It's a pity, really."

Weeks ago, Kochtitzky had to cancel seminars on sustainable living at the Eudora Welty Library. "We just didn't have enough people signing up," he says, shaking his head. "Sometimes it's like people are blind to incoming catastrophe. Of course, we're messing up our world. Of course, global warming exists. Even when more hot water in the Gulf churns up a horrible storm like Katrina, we refuse to link that storm generator to global warming."

Kochtitzky then leans forward, his ancient eyes still piercing, as capable of detecting danger signs as they were four decades ago.

"When was the last time it really snowed in Jackson? Do people think that's just a coincidence?"

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