Our new house does not have trash pick-up service. Given that our driveway is a two hundred foot gravel incline to the street above I'm not really that disappointed. I can't even imagine hauling a can or two up there each week. Instead, we load our trash and recyclables into the van and take it seven miles down the road to the trash and recycling center.
The trash and recycling center is about the coolest place on earth if you really love organization - and I do. There are different bays for house waste, yard waste, and appliances. There are also recycling bays for cardboard and paper, plastics and glass, batteries, electronics, tires, steel, and more. I couldn't wait to get home and tell Tricia all about it after my first trip. I guess I'm easily amused.
Hauling your own trash really helps you to be more aware of the amount of waste you create in a week. Because it took us a week or two to figure out how and where to get rid of our trash our first haul was a pretty big one. We had to put all the seats in the van down and cram everything in.
My last trip to the center was last Sunday. A few days ago, maybe Thursday, I was walking around the side of the house and opened up one of the trash cans to drop in a scrap of trash I found lying in the woods. When I lifted the lid I noticed there weren't any bags of trash inside. Confused, I opened up the other trash can and found it, too, had no bags. I went inside and checked the kitchen trash can. It was mostly full but still had a bit of room left. Wow, in five or so days we hadn't filled even a single bag yet. I was amazed. Knowing this changed my trashy habits. I began avoiding making trash and crushing what I did make down to the size of nothingness.
Finally on Saturday the kitchen trash was on the verge of overflowing and had to be taken out. We almost made it a whole week. Almost. Though it wasn't on purpose I was proud to see we were somehow minimizing our waste. I say it wasn't on purpose but we do try to avoid things that are heavily packaged and single serving items. Last week I was on a trip where more than two hundred Capri Suns were handed out to a group of kids. Now that's wasteful.
A great way to avoid creating waste is to fix broken things rather than buying new ones. Or fighting the temptation to have the newest version of something that works perfectly. Or finding a new home for unwanted things. There's actually a website for giving your old stuff away. It's called Freecycle and can be found at www.freecycle.org.
We joined Freecycle for the first time in St. Louis. We used it to get rid of our treadmill after we realized how miserable it is to walk inside. After listing it on the site we had about eight or nine interested parties contact us within a few hours. We chose one randomly and it was picked up from our driveway the following Saturday.
A few weeks after getting rid of the treadmill our new dog jumped on our new mattress and made a new deposit right in the center of the pillow top. She completely saturated it. Thinking the mattress was a lost cause I jumped on Freecycle and placed a "Wanted" ad for a queen sized mattress. Someone replied and a few days later my buddy Tim and I drove to their house to pick it up. Standing at their front door we looked down behind the bushes and saw a whole army of cigarette butts. It might be reasonable to believe these people only smoked out on the front porch and that the mattress wouldn't smell like cigarette smoke but I wasn't about to find out. We high-tailed out of there before anyone could answer the door.
Though we are members, we haven't had the chance to use Freecycle here in Columbia just yet. We generally call the Salvation Army to pick up any large items we're getting rid of and the smaller stuff is delivered to Goodwill. Still, I love the idea of Freecycle and look at their listings from time to time. Looking at it tonight I saw the following items offered or requested: wedding stuff, a dog who barks loudly but listens a little, serving dishes, a lawnmower, and a kitten. But by far my favorite was this...
Wanted: Sandpaper
I need a piece of sandpaper to sand out some scratches on my dining room baseboard. Maybe someone has an extra square or two from a small job they just completed? I'd be able to pick it up tomorrow, if convenient.
Ha. While I love the idea of sharing resources and all, I'm not sure a single square of sandpaper warrants a drive across town. Is it just me or is this a bit fanatical? There's always a crazy to make the rest of us look bad.
Whew! When I was first reading about your dog deposit on the mattress, I thought you were going to "Freecycle" it. - Slightly used, almost good-as-new queen sized mattress.
ReplyDeleteMy mom has to take her trash to the recycle center and she is very thrifty. She's been a recycler all of my adult life. She did it before it was cool. Like you, she has it down to a science. She spreads out almost all of her organic trash, crushes her cans down, breaks down boxes, reuses every bag she can, etc. I honestly think that if we were made to take our own trash to the dump and pay for it by the bag, we'd have half as much. I admire you country people for your grit and determination.
Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout
Would not take the garbage out!
She'd scour the pots and scrape the pans,
Candy the yams and spice the hams,
And though her daddy would scream and shout,
She simply would not take the garbage out.
And so it piled up to the ceilings:
Coffee grounds, potato peelings,
Brown Bananas, rotten peas,
Chunks of sour cottage cheese.
It filled the can, it covered the floor,
It cracked the window and blocked the door
With bacon rinds and chicken bones,
Drippy ends of ice cream cones,
Prune pits, peach pits, orange peel,
Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal,
Pizza crusts and withered greens,
Soggy beans and tangerines,
Crusts of black burned buttered toast,
Grisly bits of beefy roasts...
The garbage rolled down the hall,
It raised the roof, it broke the wall...
Greasy napkins, cookie crumbs,
Globs of gooey bubble gum,
Cellophane from green baloney,
Rubbery blubbery macaroni,
Peanut butter, caked and dry,
Curdled milk and crusts of pie,
Moldy melons, dried-up mustard,
Eggshells mixed with lemon custard,
Cold french fries and rancid meat,
Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat.
At last the garbage reached so high
That finally it touched the sky.
And all the neighbors moved away,
And none of her friends would come to play.
And finally Sarah Cynthia Slylvia Stout said,
"Ok, I'll take the garbage out!"
But then, of course, it was too late...
The garbage reached across the state,
From New York to the Golden Gate.
And there, in the garbage she did hate,
Poor Sarah met an awful fate,
That I cannot right now relate
Because the hour is much too late.
But children, remember Sarah Stout
And always take the garbage out!
by Sheldon Allan Silverstein
The trash I seem to struggle with the most is electronics. Every time a piece of technology goes out, there is literally no place to put it. Fixing it often costs more than replacing it, and so we replace it... leaving us with a giant printer, monitor, DVD player, or cordless phone set sitting in the garage. Scott just brought some of these "broken electronics" to school so that he class could pull them apart and take a look on the inside. But other than that, they eventually go in the trash. What a bummer. Oh! And diapers. Yuck! We used cloth up until a month ago, but after a series of infections, we are using disposable as per pediatricians suggestion. Infections are gone, but the landfill grows... I can't even bare to think of how many diapers are sitting in the landfill. Ewwwww.
ReplyDeleteGood for you and your fam for paying attention. The capri sun thing really made me think. I put those in Em's lunch all the time. But seeing a few hundred at once go in the trash can really changes perspective.