Real Waste Mangement - An Awakening

There’s nothing like not being able to quickly and cleanly dispose of your trash to make you really think about your waste management. I thought I was pretty focused on the whole reduce, reuse, recycle thing but now I know I was barely scrapping the surface. I was a poseur.

My Texas town dealt with residential trash by using a dumpster system whereby lots of dumpsters were placed all around town. Residents deposited their trash in the nearest one. In my case, there was a dumpster in the alley at the back of my yard. It was incredibly convenient. Recycling, which had to be hauled to the recycling center, was somewhat less so. I was a fair recycler but have to admit to occasionally dumping it all in the convenient dumpster just to be rid of it.

Where I live now, eight miles from a very small town in Virginia, there is no trash pickup, dumpsters or any other convenient way to dispose of trash. Every piece has to be hauled into town to the landfill. Residential trash dumping costs $3 a carload. Since one is paying by the carload it’s not fiscally responsible to drag one bag of trash into town so it has to be stockpiled, preferably in some clean, odor free way until a carload is achieved. For me that’s about five trash bags full. Now I know what it means to be conscious of the amount of trash I am creating.

I’m finally really considering the amount of packaging on every purchase I make. Even more importantly, before every purchase, I’m stopping to consider whether I need to make that purchase. Before I stick it in the trash, I’m contemplating what other use I might make of every item or whether it can be composted. I’m wondering if there is any way I can stop from putting the item into the bag.

I always knew that if I wasn’t using them for seedling pots, the cardboard tubes inside paper towel and toilet paper rolls could be soaked, torn up and put in my worm bin. I knew the worms would also make short work of my oatmeal canisters. Sometimes I’d let them, other times I’d take the easy way out and just chunk them; well, no more.

I participate on a self-sufficient living forum and the other day I read a post where someone said the real way to be self-sufficient is to never throw anything away. That way, if you need something there’s a chance you might have it. This person clearly was not referring to household trash but all the little its and bits that we collect that might possibly be reusable. Unfortunately, the literal effects of that method of trash control are all too visible on the farm on which I am currently living.

Five outbuildings filled with junk that must be cleared away for the buildings to be usable is not my idea of the perfect way to “reduce, reuse and recycle”. If all these items had been carefully considered as they were being purchased or after they’d been used, they could have been dealt with in a responsible manner. Unfortunately, a lot of what is in those buildings is now going to end up in the landfill. I’m struggling with the recyclables and possible reusables in all that mess. The sheer volume of stuff makes it almost impossible to really sort through. A good example is the jars. The farmer’s wife canned a lot of produce and, in addition to saving canning jars, she clearly saved every jar that ever came through her hands. There are hundreds, if not thousands of jars on this place. I’m going to save the canning jars but all the others are going to have to go. I plan to start boxing them up and hauling them into town to drop in the glass recycling bin with every trip I make. It just may not be possible to deal with all of them in that way in any workable time frame. Some may have to just be thrown away.

Clearly a balance needs to be struck. I’m keeping “Reduce” at the top of my list of environmentally responsible choices. There’s nothing like losing the clean, convenient way most of us dispose of our trash to really wake us up and make us think. It may not be in your outbuildings, but your trash is stored somewhere, in some landfill and there is too much of it!

Are you a good recycler? Do you consider the packaging when you buy an item? Do you buy items made from post-consumer waste? Do you think about what you are throwing away? Do you really? What are you doing to reduce the amount of trash you are producing? I've finally gotten the message and I hope you have too!