Whether you're living wild off the land in the Australian outback or kicking up your heels in Manhattan, everybody, I mean everybody, makes trash. Trash could be as simple as fruit rinds, animal bones, and human waste buried in the ground, or as complex as an old refrigerator that has to be disposed of carefully, draining the poisonous Freon and removing the doors so children can't lock themselves inside and suffocate.
So, with trash the big question is, how do we get rid of it?
When I moved to Italy, I couldn't take all my stuff with me- I had a lot to unload. We gave appliances to family and called the Volunteers of America to take furniture, exercise equipment, kitchen things. The rest of our unwanted belongings filled up the industrial-sized dumpster outside our house- four weeks in a row.
Trash takes up space.
When we moved into our first Italian apartment, understanding the garbage bureaucracy was quite a challenge. There were black bags for regular garbage, yellow bags for plastic bottles, I think blue was for paper and cardboard, pink for cans and bottles, and green was the color for biological garbage (known affectionately by the locals as bio, known in our house as the "stinky trash"). You've got it, the Italians recycled food. The bio garbage went to some communal compost heap in the country. Egg shells, coffee grinds, leftover pasta, cheese rinds, cat food covered in sock lint- anything that could biodegrade went in there. Separating all those categories was fairly space consuming in my tiny kitchen, as I needed bins to keep everything separate. I also had to keep track of alternating collection days. Later in Turin, the process was simplified by marked dumpsters practically outside my front door. No more color-coded bags of garbage piled in my kitchen. On my return to the states it took me about a month to stop reflexively pausing every time I dumped carrot and potato peels in with the regular trash.
While visiting my father-in-law I was introduced to a whole new way of thinking about garbage- by the pound. He opted not to pay for garbage collection, but instead to load all his trash into the back of his car and drive it to the dump. There he was presented with a game card. He drove from station to station, and workers weighed his trash and his various forms of recycling. The game card tallied the weight of the recycled material against the weight of the garbage, and he paid the difference by the pound as he left.
Trash has weight, ergo mass.
Here in Brooklyn I needed to get rid of a large appliance still in working order. I called the Salvation Army, and after nearly an hour of run-around was told they wouldn't come take it. When I told my neighbor this story, he laughed, and helped me carry the appliance to the curb. He'd had a similar experience with the Salvation Army, and told me around here all I needed to do was leave my item on the curb a few days before collection. He'd gotten rid of a working refrigerator and broken water heater that way. Someone would pick it up, he told me- and, sure enough, my item disappeared. Yesterday on the way to buy bread I almost tripped on a toaster oven- a sticky note on the side read, "still works."
Growing up in Iowa garage sale Saturdays were thrilling family treasure hunts.
In Turin used wardrobe bins were all over the neighborhood. Homeless people broke into them overnight, and in the morning immigrant women and children picked through the used shirts, trousers, and shoes.
Trash can be reused.
My grocery service delivers all my produce and deli items with stickers that bear my name and address. Someday when future generations are mining a landfill they're going to come across my name. "Heather Pagano of XYZ St., Brooklyn dumped her Styrofoam banana padding here." I know the service is just trying to keep my bananas from arriving smashed, but my name is on that stuff! People are going to know I'm responsible. I actually stopped buying certain items because of the packaging. Ecologically unsound packaging costs my grocery service at least $7.50 a week Could ecological packaging ever become a selling point? Only if consumers are signing their names to their garbage- literally or figuratively.
We're responsible for the things we don't want anymore.
And what about a world where the cost of garbage disposal is super high? This is already true in places like Japan, where the disposal of furniture or appliances requires the Japanese to go to city hall, fill out a form, and purchase a costly seal they attach to the used item so collectors know the pick-up has been paid for. What if trash collection became too expensive for families to afford? Imagine people just chucking their trash outside- what a mess! The freelancer junk market would boom as it collected, refurbished, and resold used goods. Services like eBay would be flooded with remade junk. How would the economy continue to flow if purchasing items became a liability?
The fewer places there are to go with the garbage, the more costly its removal.
In a sense, modern man isn't that different in his trash technology than the first caveman who buried the remains of his meal. We can't do much more than dig a hole and bury stuff underground. We've learned a lot about previous generations by examining the stuff they buried, or that got buried by earthquake, flood, volcanic eruption, time. We are putting the signature of our civilization into landfills. Someone is going to be digging through it someday, looking for non-renewable resources we thoughtlessly threw away. I wonder what they'll think of us?
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