Taking out the Trash
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
Even though I have been recycling since I was a little girl, I am sometimes still amazed by the amount of time and energy that goes into processing my own household waste. When I was little, recycling was a family activity – we would sort glass and aluminum, crush cans and bundle newspapers on Saturday mornings, than load everything into our Datsun 510 and deliver it to the University of Maryland’s recycling center. Taking care of the recycling was just a part of life – something I didn’t think much about, but instead simply did.
Today, recycling seems much more complicated than back in the early 80’s. I live in a small apartment that has a living room/dining room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. There are trash recepticals in each room, and when I actually take the time to empty them and sort through my trash, I’m always shocked by how long it takes me to finish the task. Now, I will admit that I could process my waste more frequently, (thereby cutting down on the sheer volume of garbage I ever need to process at once), but that’s just not how I do things. Instead of taking out the trash once a week, I wait until the stack of paper behind my desk is overflowing, and the plastic bottles are overflowing their bins in my living room.
When I do finally process my trash, it takes time to sort through my desk garbage and separate the sensitive documents that need to be shred from the used envelopes, offers for gym memberships and well-read magazines. Once everything is sorted, I typically have a large paper shopping bag (today’s bag probably weighs 10 pounds) full of newspapers, magazines, advertisements and other recyclables. My shredder gets a small stack of sensitive documents, and there’s usually a plastic shopping bag worth of pure garbage left over.
Once that’s done, I pull out the paper recycling from the bathroom and bedroom trash containers, find any shampoo bottles that have made their way into the garbage can, and than set to work on sorting the other recyclables. My city recycles paper, cardboard, several types of plastic, glass and aluminum. I take this kind of recycling out every few weeks (as compared to the paper which I sort through every few months), and will normally dispose of 30-40 plastic bottles, 5 or 6 glass containers, and a milk crate full of cardboard.
The kitchen garbage tends to be straightforward, mostly because I don’t throw recyclables into that bin, and I don’t compost my food waste. I thought about composting, but I live in the city, have no yard, cook little, and don’t know what I would do with the waste in a full kitchen compost crock. The kitchen garbage goes out every two weeks or so, and is most difficult to deal with when I’ve cleaned out the fridge and had to toss out rotten food.
It would be easier to simply stick all of my solid waste into large black plastic bags and dump it in the
garbage, but sorting through my garbage is helpful. By being forced to look through the remnants of my consumption, I am forced to acknowledge how much I use, and to think about the impact my purchases have on my community, my country and my planet. In her book, Garbage Land, Elizabeth Royte writes about sorting through her trash for a year, and recording all she threw away as part of an experiment she took on to track her consumption. While I don’t go nearly as far as Royte, I do try to look at what I throw away and ask myself if I could be doing a better job at reducing my own consumption.
Like almost everyone out there, I certainly could do better – and I’m trying. There are fewer plastic water bottles in my recycling bin than there have been in the past, I am making an effort to eat all of the groceries I purchase before they rot, and I’m taking steps to cut down on the number of bills that arrive in my mailbox. Changing your lifestyle to reduce what you purchase, reuse what you can, and recycle everything possible is a process that takes time and energy, and isn’t always fun. There are certainly things I might have enjoyed doing more today, but the paper behind my desk overwhelmed all else, so today became the day I had to take out the trash. It’s still just a part of life, but now I understand much more clearly how my actions (or inactions) impact the world around me.
One last note – if you’re interested in what happens to your garbage after you leave it on the curb, check out Garbage Land. It’s an interesting read and Royte does a great job picking apart the complex after life of our garbage.
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