Garbage Day

I have been thinking about waste. Today is garbage day and what I notice every week is the huge trash bins that every house has. The house next door has just two people. Their trash bin is the large size and they rarely put out a recycling bin. Up and down the street are households that fill the large trash bin and only sometimes have a recycling bin.

Meanwhile, new products are created everyday that add to the waste stream. Dust cloths that get thrown away instead of washed, containers of food that used to come in boxes or cans, now in plastic bag type containers that aren't even recyclable. Food containers for leftovers that are designed to last only a few months have replaced tupperware that could last a lifetime or more. Appliances that are designed so poorly they don't last more than a couple of years before they have to be thrown away. If all of those products had prices that reflected their real cost to us, we wouldn't buy them. Putting food in the plastic bags may be a savings for the manufacturer but who pays the cost of the plastic in the landfill for centuries to come?

On the other hand, my full recycling bin is also waste. It took energy and created waste products to make the glass and plastic bottles and the cardboard and paper. It will take more energy and create more waste products to recycle them. Better to recycle than to throw away. But even better is to figure out a way to reduce. People are starting to do this--cloth shopping bags for the grocery store instead of the plastic or paper ones. I try not to use disposable products like paper plates, napkins, etc. and I stopped shopping at Costco for food when they started putting normal sized containers inside the jumbo sized containers. Two boxes worth of cereal in one big box saves packaging, two actual boxes inside one big one is waste. But other than these examples, I find it hard to think of ways to reduce.

There are extremes. For example, the people who made the compact not to be consumers for a year. They were allowed to by food and necessary clothing, but other than that they had to buy used or do without for an entire year. Click here for the article about their experience. There is also the one year experiment done by Barbara Kingsolver and her family to eat only what they could get locally for one year. (This was a really good book, by the way!) Click here for the book's website with ideas, recipes, etc. These extreme examples led these people to see the world differently when the year was over and led to longer term changes in their habits. This morning as I listen to the garbage trucks carry away mountains of garbage from our neighborhood, I am wondering how I can use what they learned, but do it in an incremental rather than extreme way.