Friday, October 22, 2010

TRASH TALKING

Hey, it's Jenn.  Anyone who knows me would never expect to hear what I'm about to say...I dug through the trash two days ago.  Yes, it was disgusting.  Yes, I saw a mouse and screamed.  But yes, I would do it again if I had to.
Here's the scenario:  the garbage can in the kitchen was full.  I pulled out the bulging white sack of trash and hauled it out to the three cans outside.  Oh, make that four cans.  There it was, sitting on it's freshly built stand---the compost bin. It seemed to be saying "I'm so hungry, feed me!"  I shook my head to clear out the hallucination and  started to lift the lid of the gray bin (the garbage one) and felt--icky.  And it wasn't because of the smell.  It was because I just knew that some of the stuff that I was going to throw into the garbage bin should be going into one of the other three bins for recycle or regeneration.
So, I plugged my nose (not really because I'd touched the gross garbage can and didn't want to put maggot eggs in my nose in case they were on my hands now) and dove in.  Well, I didn't dive in.  I used my two pinchy fingers and pulled out the pieces of garbage one at a time.
But, the amazing news is that after going through the whole big sack of trash that was almost on its way to the dump, where it would sit and emit toxic gases for the next hundred years, all but about two cups of yuck went into the other cans.  A whole sack of trash, and there were only two cups left?  And that's after we'd so diligently used our indoor recycle bin!  What???!!
I found sunflower stems that could go in the compost bin, fruits and veggies that went into the compost bin, plastic food containers with food in them that should have been rinsed out and put in the recycle, and on and on.
And now, after two days of living, here is a photo of how much garbage we have accumulated:

What normally would have been three trips to the gray garbage bin with full bags of trash, is now a half full plastic grocery bag.  The other two cans in the photo are the recycle and the compost.
It's been difficult figuring out what goes where, and we've had family discussions at the dinner table so that we are all figuring out how to make the right decisions.  We had a great conversation about whether leftover food on our plates should go down the disposal into our water system and cleaned through that process so it doesn't sit in the landfill at all, or into the landfill where the recology people could change the methane into electricity.  What do you think? 

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