A Temporary Matter

I started my Sunday by reading an article about Earth Hour, which took place yesterday at 8:00 p.m. around much of the world. In honor of Earth Hour, national landmarks across the globe dimmed their lights. Citizens were encouraged to turn off any non-essential lights, computers, and appliances. People in many countries turned Earth Hour into a celebration. In Greece folks strolled through the streets with candles (that must have been pretty). Australians enjoyed candlelit dinners and beach bonfire parties.

The next thing I picked up to read was "A Temporary Matter," a short story from Jhumpa Lahiri's collection, Interpreter of Maladies. The premise of the story revolved around a scheduled blackout. In order to repair local power lines, a young couple would be without power starting from 8:00 p.m. for exactly one hour. The similarity of the couple's situation to Earth Hour struck me (although unlike Earth Hour, this blackout would be repeated throughout the week until the lines were repaired).

For the characters in "A Temporary Matter," these scheduled hours of darkness were the time when they came to terms with a tragic event that had damaged their relationship. Being alone in the dark together, lighting candles, telling stories, reconnected them. Now, the morning after Earth Hour, we read that the globally scheduled hour of darkness not only represented environmental responsibility and hope for the future, but that it brought people together on both a global and local level.

Why is it so much easier for human beings to connect in the dark, their meeting lit only by flickering candles? Something about the darkness makes us shed just enough of our individual defenses to connect with others. Perhaps our reaction is simply a throwback to our primitive past, huddled in the darkness with only a fire and our companions for warmth. And certainly part of the answer is that when we are cut off from the distractions of our modern lives, and have nothing to pay attention to but the people around us, we suddenly realize that they're there.

London Smog

When the yellow pea soup of London's famous fog came up in two different books I was reading this weekend (Neverwhere, Niel Gaiman and Thunderstruck, Erik Larson), I had to look into the phenomenon.

The most interesting article I found on the web was from the EPA. The EPA was less interested in yellow pea soup as grounds for creepy historical ambiance than as an early environmental crisis. London's noxious fog was produced by burning soft sea coal- a cheap alternative to burning wood (or later, the harder anthracite coal). The soft sea coal gave off about as much smoke as it did heat, and belched out the chimneys of homes and factories to blend with the hovering water vapor, and coat the city in thick, yellow smog that sometimes lurked for days.

The EPA article cites London's first environmental legislation at 1272, when King Edward I banned the use of sea coal literally on pain of death. But the EPA article points out that by then wood was scarce (forests had already been plundered to build the city and to heat its dense population's wood burning stoves), and because wood was scarce, it was expensive. Despite the fact that Edward actually had the first sea coal-burning offender put to death, folks kept on using sea coal. See, the king couldn't kill the whole swarm Londonders who didn't have the money to keep warm any other way. The pressure of their need and numbers overrode environmental legislation, and continued to do so until 1952, when a four day immersion in yellow pea soup killed about 4,000 people.

The deaths, the phenomenon of indigent children hired to light a pedestrian's way through the fog, and the pea soup nickname, have become a way for modern writers to evoke the ambiance of London's past. But imagine living through that smog. Imagine being Tolkien, imagine being Shakespeare (The EPA article points out that Shakespeare lived through these fogs, and its influence is evidenced by Macbeth's witches: "fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air"). Pea-soupers weren't some quirky phenomenon from the past, they were the smelly smoke of poverty, of deprivation and environmental catastrophe that you could taste on your tongue, wipe from your skin. It settled in your clothes and hair, penetrated lungs and brought out great coughing wads of mucous. It was the cost of building a great city, and the cost of surviving there and maintaining a decent standard of living.

Amphibious Houses and Sea Snakes

In the news recently have been some interesting futuristic engineering solutions to building homes and harnessing energy. Notice the common theme- water!

Amphibious houses, or "floating eco-homes," as the BBC article terms them, are already in use in the Netherlands, where rising water and real estate shortage have birthed the invention of a home that can float on water. If you're not a young Dutch couple desperate to move out of the tiny apartment you share with in-laws, this is still an interesting technology to follow. Amphibious houses can withstand flooding (accommodating a water rise up to 13 feet) and are promising alternatives to coastal housing in flood zones. People with their eyes on a future drowned by global warming can also imagine these houses as models for "floating cities" of the future.

Sea snakes are being used by Scottish engineers to harvest wave farms off the coast of Scotland and Portugal (read the BBC article on sea snakes). Sea snakes are actually enormous metal tubes called a Pelamis wave energy converter. In very simple terms, the rocking of the waves rocks the metal tube. The pulsing motion of the tube pushes hydraulic fluid through a generator to produce electricity. An interesting problem of wave farming is that engineers purposely build them to be inefficient. Wikipedia says that's because a storm at sea could cause a power surge that would put Marvel Comic's Electro to shame (they didn't say it exactly like that, but you get the point). I love the concept of tapping into the unfathomable power of the ocean, and the fact that the biggest challenge in harnessing it is how to tone that power down.

Why Write This Story?

Of all the potential story ideas we cracked out of coconuts in yesterday's post, the one that got under my skin was Joe-Bob VanDermeer's situation (he's got a last name now, that's how you know it's getting serious).

We've discussed how a science fiction writer can get ideas. Now, how does the writer choose which idea becomes a story?

The answer is as diverse as the writer. No doubt an action-adventure oriented sf writer (think Michael Crichton) would have gone for bioweapon smuggling in coconut shells. Other writers may have been attracted to the idea of crime rings selling illicit tubs of petroleum based Tide on the black market. Some would have gone for a futuristic Great Gatsby in which rich women trapped in their personal corporate hells let loose at wild parties where they dance wearing nothing but coconut shells. After a brainstorming session, one of the resulting ideas keeps popping up in the writer's head- in the shower, commuting to work, peeling potatoes- a certain situation will worm its way into the brain and get lodged there. The only way to get it back out is to write it. Joe-Bob got stuck in my head, and he'll be the subject of my next story.

Can a writer know that a story will be a best-seller (or a seller, at all) before writing it? Not unless it's possible to ride on the confidence of name recognition and previous success. But, wait a minute, doesn't the writer want some kind of guarantee all the work of writing the story will be worthwhile? Yes, of course! I'll explain how you find the guarantee in a minute.

Over the last twenty-four hours Joe-Bob VanDermeer has been simmering in my brain. Here's what I know about him:

1. He hates coconut-based biodiesel with a passion and refuses to buy a vehicle that runs on it because he and his father were counting on ethanol (corn-based fuel) making them enough money to keep the family farm. The U.S. has turned its back on the small, independent American farmer by approving vehicles that run on Copranol instead of Ethanol- allowing poor nations overseas to get "rich" while Joe-Bob struggles to hold the family's land. To make matters worse for Joe-Bob, vehicles that don't run on Copranol are no longer made- and neither is Copranol-free diesel.
   
2. He's a die-hard Lutheran. He believes the conception of his son is a miracle. He identifies with Abraham as a hero figure, but is not so crazy as to think he is Abraham and his child is Isaac.
3. He wants the child to be a boy so much, that he refuses to believe he's going to have a daughter even after Peggy's sonogram. Though this appears sheerly sexist, we will learn that Joe-Bob's family life is extremely female-dominated. He's craving male companionship and misses the father-son relationship he had with his (dead) dad.
   
4. He loves his family with all his heart.

Joe-Bob is precisely the kind of person I wouldn't be friends with- provincial, hyper-religious, suspicious and jealous of foreign people and ideas, sexist. But he's only got one job in the female-dominated process of bringing his "miracle" child into the world- to get Peggy to the hospital for the delivery. He's determined to bring his son into the world his own way- to drive Peggy to the hospital on coconut-free diesel. Trouble is, regular diesel doesn't exist, anymore. I know Joe-Bob is going to go on a search to find it, I know Peggy's going into labor early- forcing his hand. I know at the last minute Joe-Bob's going to remember his father's old tractor, and that the couple will be tooling down the highway in an antique John Deere, stopping up traffic from Boonsville to Urbandale. The image of Joe-Bob and his pregnant wife put-putting to the emergency room in a tractor makes me love him, and makes me intrigued to learn more about the woman sitting beside him, knee jammed against the tiller.

The ideas that came together to form the scenes above came from researching solutions to our current environmental problems. Then like tinder they were sparked by images from my childhood in Iowa: eating dust on stretches of highway while creeping behind tractors who shouldn't have been on the road, my grandfather's farm, government cars with corn ears painted on the doors (Ethanol advertisements), and by stories from my husband's grandmother about the birth of her children, stories of friends who have had sonograms. The only person who could possibly write Joe-Bob Vandermeer's story is me. That's what I'm selling, that's what I'm offering to my readers- a story that only I can write. That's how I know its worth creating, and worth sharing with the world.

Coconut Bras and Drug Smuggling- Where Science Fiction Ideas Come From

How do science fiction writers get their ideas? It's a question every writer who does a book signing, interview, or question-answer inevitably hears. Today we'll go step by step through the process.

Over the last few posts, I've gone into a lot of detail about environmental responsibility and green cleaning. We've talked global warming, we've talked trash, we've talked about environmental problems now and in the future, and looked at possible solutions.

The science fiction writer researches a topic and gathers as many of these possible solutions around her as possible. Then she examines them, one by one, and tries to think of all the new problems that could come out of those solutions. See, a story isn't a story unless there's a problem.

Let's get more concrete here and talk about coconuts. Yesterday in the segment on green cleaning I mentioned that today's environmentally friendly vegetable based soaps are made out of Copra (oil from the pressed seeds of coconuts). Sounds like a great idea, right? Coconuts are a renewable resource, and the use of soap in place of detergent cuts down on the use of the non-renewable resource, petroleum. An International Herald Tribune article even claims that the oil used to manufacture soaps is also being successfully tested in Samoa as an alternative fuel source for cars and power plants! Hooray for coconuts, they'll save the planet. They grow on trees, for gosh sake. What could possibly go wrong?

Evil giggle of the science fiction writer.

We already know biodiesel fuels have drawbacks. That solvent property that makes coconut oil into great dirt-dissolving soap, actually loosens engine debris which jams filters. Biodiesel breaks down rubber engine components and compromises seals and pumps in automobiles. Lower fuel efficiency, high cost, and sparse availability are also problems. (HowStuffWorks.com ) Can these problems be overcome? Sure. Car manufacturers can design new cars to run on these solvent, lower efficiency fuels. But what about Joe-Bob from Booneville, IA? He's still driving his 1990 Chevy Silverado. The old Silverado's still got life in her, but since everybody in the surrounding cities have switched to new-fangled coconut diesel, Joe-Bob can't find any old-fashioned fuel for his pick-up (biodiesel stalls the Silverado and stops her up good). Joe-Bob's wife is expecting their first son (Joe-Bob knows it's a boy no matter what that crank doctor says in Urbandale). The baby is practically a miracle, since Joe-Bob and his wife have been trying to conceive all seven years of their marriage. Joe-Bob needs the Silverado filled with old-fashioned diesel so he can get Peggy to Urbandale for the delivery without breakdowns. He's going to have to trek all over Dallas County to find the coconut-free diesel he needs- and the fact that his Silverado is out of fuel isn't going to make his journey any easier.

Enough Joe-Bob. Let's go city-chic.

New York goes green. Public transportation runs on coconuts. A heavy tax on petroleum based consumer products makes it cheaper for New Yorkers to buy environmentally responsible cleaning products. It's going to take a lotta coconuts to fuel, bathe, and scrub the city (or the nation!!). So what happens to all the coconut shells? It's not a long-term problem, since the shells will eventually biodegrade. But what if coconut shells became all the environmentally-conscious fashion rage? According to Wikipedia, coconut shells can be used to make buttons, musical instruments, and, my personal favorite, can be used to "theatrical effect" by making an "improvised coconut bra". Can you see it now? Lingerie shops across Manhattan, the dummies in the store front windows are dressed in hula skirts and coconut bras. All the best parties are filled with women who have rigged coconut shells to make a sexy, environmentally-conscious fashion statement. I can hear the jokes about shell size now.

On to more story-centric musing. Wikipedia suggests coconut shells can house small animals or make nifty guitar-esque Asian instruments and drums. The thing that strikes me about the coconut shell is that they can be hollowed. The coconut shell could be made into the perfect drug smuggling scheme. In my future vision, coconut shells, whole or hollowed, are going to be moving across borders for processing and waste disposal. Anything from cocaine to a bio-engineered germ that would kill millions of people (or maybe just wipe out all the cash crop coconut trees) could be smuggled inside a coconut.

My fingers are itching with three or four other more potential problems. Yikes! There's number five. This is how science fiction writers get their ideas. Not all of them make it to the story development phase, but science fiction stories are born as ideas, and this is (more or less) where they come from.

Green Cleaning (Part 4- Looking back to see a better future)

"Organic chemicals are widely used as ingredients in household products. Paints, varnishes, and wax all contain organic solvents, as do many cleaning, disinfecting, cosmetic, degreasing, and hobby products. Fuels are made up of organic chemicals. All of these products can release organic compounds while you are using them, and, to some degree,when they are stored."

-from the EPA.

Many Americans are poisoning themselves with the products they use to clean their homes- and this information isn't just coming from nontoxic cleaner manufacturers like Seventh Generation- it's coming from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Last November I made the switch to green cleaning. I'd like to say it was a gesture of my deep commitment to protecting the environment for future generations, but the truth is, I made the switch to improve the health of myself and my husband today.

Here's some more cheery news from the EPA:

"Research shows that some VOCs can cause chronic and acute health effects at high concentrations, and some are known carcinogens. Low to moderate levels of multiple VOCs may also produce acute reactions."

What household cleaning products produce these damaging VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds)? The answer lies under the bathroom sink, in the linen closet, wherever you keep your cleaners. Products such as chlorine bleach, ammonia, oven cleaner, and toilet cleaner produce damaging VOCs both when you're using them, and when they're sitting seemingly harmlessly beneath the bathroom sink.

I have none of these products left in my home. So how do I clean? By traveling back in time and looking at what people used to clean their homes before these harsh chemicals were on the market. There is nothing in my home that can't be cleaned with vinegar, baking soda, and vegetable soap.

Vinegar can be used in place of chlorine bleach to remove stains. Half a cup left to sit in the toilet gets the bowl sparkling clean. A solution of vinegar and water cleans glass, shower doors, the refrigerator. Vinegar's acidic properties dissolve mineral build-up, and give it disinfecting properties. If your child broke into the cleaning cabinet and drank the bottle of vinegar, he might get sick to his stomach, but if he drank the same amount of chlorine bleach or toilet cleaner he would die if you didn't make it to the hospital in time. Even if he doesn't get into the cleaners, the EPA says it's possible their presence in the cabinet may cause him to develop cancer when he gets older. What do you want in your house- vinegar or toilet cleaner? Most people don't have to care about saving the whales to answer this question.

Baking soda is my abrasive cleaner of choice. It scrubs pots and pans, stove tops, scours bathroom tile, and eliminates grease and grime wherever I find it. It gets rid of odors in the refrigerator and on carpet and upholstery. (Bon Ami is a household-friendly and environmentally-friendly step up from baking soda for tough scouring jobs).

For everything that can't be cleaned with vinegar or baking soda, there's soap. But before we go any farther, let's talk about exactly what soap is.

As I learned in the fourth grade, soap is a surfactant, a substance that keeps water from beading up so the water comes closer in contact with dirty surfaces. The closer the water gets to the dirty surface, the easier those surfaces are to clean. Until World War I, all surfactants were soaps, and they were made from fatty oils derived from animal or vegetable sources. Wartime shortages of vegetable and animal fats during WW led to the development of synthetic surfactants in Germany. These surfactants used petroleum as the "fatty" oil source. These "artificial soaps" were called detergents, and became "widely available in the United States in the 1940's...today, detergents have all but replaced soap-based laundry products." (Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook)

Petroleum-based products haven't stopped their domination in the laundry room. Our dish soap, bath soap, all-purpose cleaners and countless household and health and beauty products are made from petroleum. Using a bottle of dish soap causes many of the same environmental problems as filling your car with oil, such as depletion of natural resources, and pollution and contamination from drilling. What's more, use of these products (especially in higher than intended concentration) pollutes your home! Detergents are less severely damaging to your health than the other cleaning agents we've talked about today, so I'll leave you with this thought: which would you rather wash your baby's bottle with- detergent made from petroleum, or soap made from vegetable oil?

Most vegetable based soaps on the market today are made from coconut oil- this goes for laundry soap or shampoo. Brands like Seventh Generation and Mrs.Meyers manufacture coconut-derived soaps. You'll also find dozens of health and beauty brands whose products are derived from coconuts instead of petroleum. Soaps are gentler on your skin, your clothes, your house, your health. And they're a heck of a lot gentler on the environment. To promote its products, Seventh Generation claims that if every U.S. household replaced their purchase of dish washing detergent with dish washing soap, the savings in petroleum could heat and cool 4,800 American homes for an entire year.

That's a lot of oil.

I think a lot of people feel that being environmentally responsible will lower their standard of living. This simply isn't true. In many cases, what's kinder to our outside homes is kinder to our inside homes and our personal well-being. Being environmentally responsible means being aware of the products you buy, and knowing your options. You don't have to buy petroleum based products and top-loading washing machines- there are alternatives. And green cleaning doesn't mean going back to the stone ages. Did you know a dishwasher run at full capacity uses about half the energy of washing dishes by hand? (Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook).

Every person, every town, city, province, nation has a unique set of physical and cultural needs. In order to make the Earth a good place to live, an effort needs to be made by government, industry, and individuals to establish guidelines, innovate solutions, and make choices that find a balance between our needs today and our needs tomorrow. Last night I heard Vice President Gore speak at the Oscars about environmental concerns as a "moral issue" as opposed to a political issue. I'd say it's an issue of survival.

This concludes the practical portion of my Green Cleaning series. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at coconut fuel and other nutty solutions to pollution problems. I don't know how many of them will be viable in the future, but it's a lot of fun to see what people come up with, and imagine some of my own.

Green Cleaning- Part 3 (Drippy Drying Racks in Brooklyn)

I was kindly invited to spend a week in an Italian country home. The scene was a small town in Northern Italy. My guestroom window opened onto the family vegetable garden, and beyond I could see people bicycling down dirt roads past vineyards. But to get a complete picture of an Italian village or city, you can't forget the laundry.

It's hanging everywhere: on collapsible drying racks in the front yard, on balconies. In the city flapping sheets are protected from pigeon poop or mop water from upstairs by yellow and green plastic sheets (in Turin I learned the hard way how important these plastic sheets can be). The visitor's first impression chugging into the train station of a city of 2,000 or 2,000,000 are the apartment buildings that face the tracks, all fluttering with laundry.

The point here is that Italian homes never have dryers, and that they do an extraordinary amount of laundry per capita.

I had many long discussions in Italy trying to explain why on earth Americans buy dryers. I heard all the arguments against them: they take up space, they consume costly energy (and put an unnecessary strain on the environment), they shorten the life of expensive clothing and family linens. In fact, when I lived in Italy, I was more than happy to sun myself on the balcony and hang the laundry out to dry. It was a pleasant task, and not so much more work than monitoring the dryer. And, sure enough, clothes never shrank, and they lasted so much longer.

About a week after living in Brooklyn, I was back to the dryer. Why?

Hanging the clothes out to dry is a great idea if you've got a big back yard or if you live in a place where every apartment, no matter how small, comes equipped with a balcony. Here I have no balcony, and certainly no big back yard. So I set up my drying rack in the bedroom to dry my husband's thick, cotton socks. The next morning they were still dripping wet.

See, Italy has a very dry climate. Here I'm in an oceanic, at times swampy climate. Humidity is my biggest household problem. The thick terry cloth towel that dried in 2-3 hours in Italy takes 2-3 days to dry in Brooklyn, and the moisture it adds to the already damp bedroom causes mold. This environmentally-friendly laundry solution is possible in Italy, but impossible in humid climates.

Back to my sojourn with Italian friends. Our hostess was allergic to my cats, so they were camped out in the spacious guest bathroom/laundry room. Every time my hostess needed to go in to do laundry, I had to stick the kitties into their carriers for her.

The cats went into the carrier for laundry three to five times a day. No kidding. This is for a household of two adults (and two guests, who only used the washer twice that week). So, what's up with that? Unlike my American friends, the Italians I knew would often wear the same outfit several days in a row, only changing their underthings. Without a doubt Americans wash their clothes more frequently. So where does all this laundry come from?

It comes from the fact that Italians rarely use disposable paper products. The fabric of Italian lives is literally fabric. A cotton or linen tablecloth is on the table at every single meal. Napkins are always made of fabric, never paper. Handkerchiefs are used instead of Kleenex. Paper towels, or carta da cucina, are only used for drying delicate washed herbs or draining fat from cooked meat, so all household cleaning is done with rags. Almost every act of cooking and cleaning involves linens, and they must be kept clean.

While transitioning between two apartments, I went a few months doing all the laundry by hand. Knuckles red, arms aching, I would scrub tablecloths, bedsheets, blue jeans, and bath towels in the sink. Rinsing them was the worst part, and you really haven't lived until you've tried to squeeze a pair of blue jeans dry. Last month while watching the film 3-Iron, I noticed that the typical Korean homes depicted in the film didn't have laundry machines. The protagonist of the film made a point of doing the laundry for his "hosts," which was accomplished by scrubbing clothes with bar soap on a textured rubber mat in the shower. I wish I'd learned this technique before those months of dunking clothes in the sink.

On the happy day I got my first Italian washing machine, I was overjoyed. I put the first load in and turned on the machine. The cycle lasted an hour and a half (opposed to the typical 20 minute cycle of an American washer). Why? Because if you're going to scrub your toilet with a rag and then reuse it, you want that puppy clean. I quickly learned the Italian way of life was a lot kinder on the rain forest, and created less garbage for those landfills I talked about on Friday. But I questioned the environmental friendliness of using gallons of potable water and gallons of petroleum-based laundry detergents, bleach, powdered disinfectant, and fabric softener.

Fortunately, environmentally-friendly laundry products are on the market in the U.S. and in Europe (see Green Cleaning- Part 4).

As for water waste, European front-loading washers use a third to half the water of a typical American top-loading model. Front-loading machines consume 68% less energy than top-loaders, and get clothes dryer on the spin cycle, reducing dryer time. They use significantly less soap, and are able to wash clothes at high enough temperatures to disinfect, eliminating the need for environmentally toxic bleach. Their drum washing system has been proven to significantly increase the life of clothes (statistics mentioned above are from Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook).

Front-loading washers are available in the U.S.- but they have only a sliver of the market share. Why? Easy answer: front-loading washing machines cost more at the store. Top-loaders are comparatively cheap. Despite the fact that water, soap, and especially energy costs would save a family money in the long run, the fast, cheap solution is the one that sells. So, is everyone in Europe rich? Why are they dishing out money on expensive front-loaders? Another easy answer: they are the only type you can buy when you go to the store. Less environmentally friendly models simply aren't available to the consumer.

We've already seen legislation passed to curtail emissions by restricting the kinds of cars and trucks automobile manufacturers can sell in America. Why not do the same thing with a washer?

Nifty textured mat or no, it is hard to envision a future world where Americans do their laundry by hand. But generations of Europeans (and likely other cultures, as well) have been using environmentally-friendly laundry techniques, and the appliances and detergents they use are keeping up with the times. The U.S. definitely has something to learn about laundry from folks across the Atlantic.

We haven't washed our hands of laundry yet. In tomorrow's installment of green cleaning, we are going to discuss detergents and cleaners of all kinds, and how the cleaning agent you choose can make a significant difference not only for the environment, but for the health of your family, today.

Green Cleaning- Part 2 (Signing Your Garbage)

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?