I am no longer smart enough to throw stuff away

The BBQ Pit
1

I am no longer smart enough to throw stuff away.

When I was a youngling, there was a trash can. You put basically everything you no longer wanted into it.

Then the world got smarter. Now you had a trash can AND a recycling can. Into the recycling can you put cans, bottles, newspapers and the ilk, and plastics. All of them.

Then they started being picky about the plastics. You had to hunt down the chasing arrows and look it up on the chart. #3? Recycle. #5? Trash.

Except the chart kept changing.

Later all styrofoam went into the recycle bin. Wait! Not black foam stuff! That’s trash.

Six months later: No styrofoam in the recycling bin at all! It’s trash! But if you have loads of the heavier packing forms or bags of the pellets, bring them to the town recycling center … but only on four days each year.

Then cardboard no longer goes into the recycling bin. It must be bundled up and also hauled to the town recycling center … but only on four days each year. (Really hope you aren’t heavily into ordering stuff from Amazon!) Good news: at least the Cardboard and Styrofoam days are the same four days. (Now I’ve done it, they’ll probably ‘fix’ that.)

Latest edict: we are no long to throw ‘fiber’ stuff into the regular trash. That’s anything made of fabric or leather or vinyl tape or stuffed animals or about twenty other types of items. These can now be bundled and put into the regular recycle bin.

But wait! All clothing must be washed and dried first!

Yeah, there’s ecological sense for you. Spend time, energy and precious water laundering and folding your no longer good clothes, so the dump trucks will look neater, I guess. Not to mention the freshly cleaned clothes will immediately be re-dirtied by drips and dregs from cans.

Unless, of course, you also spend time, energy, and water washing all your cans very carefully first! (Are we supposed to become a nation of Mr. Monks?)

I’m about to give up. I figure I can buy one of those big mesh-fenced bins they sell for composting, and dump absolutely everything into it. Start with one in the back left corner of my yard. When it over flows, erect a second one beside it. And so on. I’m old. I have a one acre yard. I bet I will die before I manage to cover the entire yard with the bins.

And bonus! Each bin will mean about several square feet of less grass to be cut! Saving precious gas! At last a benefit from all this fashing about.

2

Don’t consider throwing away shoes.
It never ever works.

3

You could solve that problem the way the local people and then the local municiplaities around here did:

  1. A sizeable fraction of the public refuses to cooperate, so every truckload of trash is full of recyclables and every truckload of recyclables is polluted with trash/garbage.

  2. The Chinese and other US & foreign entities that wanted recyclables stopped wanting them completely or changed to paying almost nothing for them.

  3. The price paid by the municipalities to the recycling contractors became 3x the price they’d have to pay for landfill disposal.

  4. The municipalities shut down all recycling programs and simply landfill everything. It’s soooo much cheaper.

4

There are many much better actions you can take to help the environment than recycling, for example:

41% of French population is in favour of a proposal to limit everyone to 4 flights in their entire life. 59% of 18-24 year-olds agree.

5

Plant trees everytime you fly. I’d back that up.

6

I feel your pain. This is the time of year, in my city, we should all be getting garbage/recycling calendars. A complex schedule wherein the day it’s picked up, shifts every week, then you skip a week, yeah, it’s always been kind of bizarre.

But they just announced only temporary calendars are available for downloading, with new twists!

We all get new green bins for weekly pick up of biodegradables. But regular garbage pickup will become biweekly! BUT…the day of the week for pickup will remain constant. The four bag limit, becomes three bags. Now you must pay for extras, yikes. And anything big, you must book an appointment 5 days in advance. (They stopped taking Christmas trees last year!)

It’s getting hard to keep up to the changes coming in this city. It’s shifting from small provincial university city, to major metropolis. It’s absolutely striking to see unfolding. I loved the sleepy little city, so it’s a little heartbreaking too.

7

Landlord here used to have a recycle bin, but got rid of it because the tenants kept screwing it up. Now it’s just a dumpster.

8

I tried that but now I’m not allowed to fly the friendly skies any longer. (Who knew that you weren’t supposed to plant the trees on the plane?)

9

We compost everything that is biodegradable. It’s easy because due to stabled livestock, we make compost in 12 x 12 bins, and move it with a tractor. Things like kitchen waste disappear into that program.

We mend things. Clothes, machines, furniture. Very very rare to have to toss something large. I also put a good bit of energy into finding homes for unwanted objects.

I buy a lot of food from bulk bins at the food co-op, or grow it, or make it from scratch.I don’t buy pre-made foods much. Mostly what I buy – jam, mayo, diced tomatoes, kippered herring – comes in jars and metal cans, which are straightforward to recycle.

Even so, we eventually accumulate garbage, and virtually all of it is plastic wrappings, bags, bottles. Plastic. Which is garbage. There is little more I can do than I do already, to prevent this.

There’s no garbage service in our town, nor is there a dump. We have a ‘transfer station’ which takes recyclables (almost no plastic), has a Town Mall as we call it which is a building where usable goods are offered for free. and the rest gets packaged up and sent to South Carolina to a dump there. We’re in rural Massachusetts – South Carolina is our version of a third world country we throw garbage on.

It’s a fucked up system.

10

Same^^

No pick up. Dump/recycling center is mostly useless and far away. And they charge you by the truck. One bag, 12 bags same price.

We do the best we can with what we produce in trash. Burn it or bury it.
Compost the compostables.

11

Our town has zero recycling. Zero. The had a big trailer parked in town for glass, cans, and cardboard. Local bars/restaurants would bring their bottles, so the town decided to end the program since it was “being abuse”.

The chickens get any edible kitchen scraps. We compost with the horse manure, producing black gold.

Cardboard, paper, wood, styrofoam, pretty much everything but tires*, goes to the burn barrel. Ash is used on blueberries and other plants that like it.

Shoes? @Beckdawrek is correct there.

*There is a family over on the backroad our road turns off of who burns constantly. They’ve burned tires, once during a severe air pollution day (looks north at Canadia). Nobody out here complains to the authorities about anything. It’s weird. We complain to each other about the crazy neighbors but that’s as far as we go.

12

As someone whose entire family lives halfway across the world, I’d be quite opposed to this proposal…

13

My city has recycling, but the apartment complex I live at does not, so I take it to a collection center down the road. NBD, because I’m headed that way anyway.

Paper, cardboard, most glass, most plastic, most metals, and a few other things I can’t remember right now. We also have a e-waste and hazardous chemical dropoff, for things like paint that the Habitat ReStore can’t take.

Anyway, the system works for me. Anything that IS trash gets bagged up by me and taken to the dumpster.

14

I have to say I am fond of the German (+ Argentinian, Japanese, etc.) solution of appropriately huge fines (for corporations too!) for improper separation of waste— and it is enforced— and magically this ceases to be a problem. (Or, if you ask them, they will tell you no one would dream of not sorting their waste in the first place.)

There is an entire complicated story of what happens to waste after it is collected— recycling, incineration, shipped elsewhere, etc. And of course the issue of cultural pressure (or lack thereof) not to throw away so much stuff, buy items wrapped in plastic, in the first place.

15

Indeed. But fines and enforcement would be considered anathema to the American culture of free-dumb.

Around here it’s somewhere in between. There are no specific laws or enforcement but from the bins I see on the street recycling is pretty much universally accepted. I can’t speak to how knowledgeable or careful people are with what they put in the recycling bins, but the program has been in place for years and the new wheeled bins they recently distributed are exceptionally large, so the program must be working. The rules are mostly fairly simple – no styrofoam, no plastic film like plastic bags, cans and jars should be rinsed and free of food contamination, and a few others. Glass, plastic, metal cans, and cardboard can all be mixed in the same bin. One of the weird rules is “no black plastic”, which I think mostly refers to black frozen dinner trays.

Also no liquor bottles, because those are supposed to be returned to recycling centers for a refund of the deposit. That’s one rule that I cheerfully violate, because they can definitely recycle glass, and the only reason for the rule is that liquor bottles add to the volume of recycling and costs them money. My rule is that’s what I pay taxes for. It’s simply not worth my while to haul them around to get a refund of 20¢ a bottle.

16

This “problem” may also be preliminarily solved by not packaging things in nonrecyclable materials in the first place.

My SIL is skeptical about recycling, in large part because of a story in their local news about the recycling trucks spotted at the landfill. However, at the time she was the mother of two teenagers, so she reluctantly did it, and chances are, the trucks really did contain non-recyclable materials (i.e. garbage).

17

Here in the senior park I live in, they have given us 3 LARGE containers and we are expected to sort everything and wash everything before placing it in the appropriate container. The containers are quite heavy for older people to deal with.

I don’t mind trying to help solve a problem, but geez oh Pete, these cans are a pain in my rear. I have a beautiful garden out front and so I have to put my cans in my driveway so they don’t damage my garden. Then I have to move them so I can get my car out and then put them back again. And they are almost empty to start with. I live by myself so don’t have much trash.

I hate Tuesday morning trash days more than Mondays now.

18

I miss having a compost heap, but that’s just not possible where I live now.

I try to avoid generating garbage in the first place, and usually have one or fewer bags to toss in the dumpster each week. If I could compost it would probably be one every two weeks.

19

We don’t have trash service. I have to take it to a transfer center and pay by the bag. Said transfer center does not have recycling, so I go to a different place for that.

Not single stream recycling, everything has to be pre-sorted by us, which is OK.

We sort glass (different colors), metal, paper, plastic(different kinds) and cardboard and cart it to the recycling center.

20

Air travel is a rounding error on the carbon production to heat uninsulated buildings and to drive cars.

Americans living 5 miles closer to their work and not driving pickup trucks alone would offset the entire worldwide air travel carbon budget.

An EU mandate to insulate old housing stock and install modern windows & heating systems would do far more good for far longer.