Garbage

Nothing I do gets me more excited than music… except garbage.

Yep. You read right. Dirty, stinky, nasty, ugly, un-healthy garbage, and it’s whereabouts. Landfills. Garbage Trucks. Garbagemen.

WHERE THE HELL DOES IT ALL GO?

WHAT REALLY HAPPENS TO IT?

HOW DO WE MAKE LESS OF IT???

1970: Little Deborah Asks: “Daddy? Where Does All The Garbage Go?”

When I was but a mere seven years old, I used to *love* watching the garbage men arrive in their shiny red truck at our San Francisco house. I would watch them take their big empty depository cans, un-lock the gate, go up our alley, and then return to the street , the cans now magically brimming with stuff, and then watch them dump the stuff into the back of the big truck.

Then one of the men, an old guy with a shiny silver buzz cut who’d always wave at little me, sitting nose-pressed against glass, and pull a lever on the side of the truck. The gnashing and grinding sounds would start, and a big claw-like scooper would slide down, over the garbage just dumped, and pull it away into the bowels of the truck, “abracadabra, poof and gone” , leaving absolutely no trace of the leftover paper, food scraps, plastics broken junk, whatever the Seymours had thrown away that week, . Well maybe a few bits of paper flying around but not much else

This fascinated me! Where did it go? How big *was * the inside of the truck> Did everyone’s garage just sit in there? Was it like Sesame Street’s Oscar The Grouch ending garbage can, the subject felled conjecture among three year olds as to how deep the earth it went? Surely, the shiny red San Francisco Waste Disposal trucks were Just like Oscars can! All the garbage go by bye, fleabite us with empty cans, a clean slate to start filling anew.

But I had to check this out with my dad.

“Daddy- where does all the garage go?”

“Into the truck, of course, Deborah ,They take it all away”

“But how big is the truck? Does it all go tin there”

“Everything from our street”

“Then where does it go?”

“They take it away”

“To WHERE Daddy?”

“Oh Deborah, why are you concerning yourself with this? They take it to a big hole in the ground.”

“What if the hole is too small”

“It’s NOT too small, Deborah. It’s very big”

“But what happens to all the garbage if the hole fills up?”

OH, DEBORAH! It won’t Fill up. And if it does,they’ll go make another hole somewhere.Anway, why are concerning yourself with something so un important? You have better things to think about.
Now, be quiet and go get ready for school.”

THIS WAS NOT OK

Of course holes filled up! Knew this from my mud-pie and buried adventure in the back yard! You can dig and dig, but sooner or later, the hole is going to fill up.I KNEW instinctively my father was wrong, but I had no idea what to do about it.

Fast forward 8 years- the New Jersey Garbage Barge.

The hole that was supposed to be endless had filled up- there was nowhere for New York City to put the garbage. My worst fears were realized.

2008:  Heather Rogers, author of “Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage:” answers little Deborah (albeit 37 years -and who knows how many trillions of tons of garbage – later:

“Eat a take-out meal, buy a pair of shoes, or read a newspaper, and you’re soon faced with a bewildering amount of rubbish. The United States is the planet’s number one producer of trash; each American throws out 4.5 pounds daily. How did we end up with this much waste, and where does it all go?

By excavating the history of rubbish handling from the 1800s—an era of garbage-grazing urban hogs and dump-dwelling rag pickers—to the present, with its high- tech “mega-fills” operated by multi-billion-dollar garbage corporations, Rogers answers these questions with a “lively authorial voice” (New York Press), offering a potent argument for change.

Over the past 30 years, worldwide garbage output has exploded, doubling in the U.S. alone. Gone Tomorrow explains that, despite popular wisdom, this torrent of rubbish is not primarily the responsibility of the consumer. In fact, shoppers often have little choice in the wastes they generate. Consider packaging: tossed cans, bottles, boxes and wrappers now take up more than a third of all U.S. landfill space. More prolific today than ever before, packaging is garbage waiting to happen.

Once buried or burned, trash is hardly benign. Landfills, even the most state-of-the-art, are environmental time bombs. They spew greenhouse gases, and leach hazardous chemicals and heavy metals into groundwater and soil. Waste incinerators are no less disastrous. They emit 70% of the world’s dioxin, and pollute the air with toxic particulate matter and a host of gases that cause acid rain”

I’ve always been fasicnated and concerned with garbage- that invedibatl away that the grownup[s all claimed the garbage went. It was a schok to visit my first landfill- one outside Boulder, Colorado, in my 20's- stinky, unsightly, disuguting and depressing. Who knew that humans were so filthy?

Whether it’s my seven-year old, 20-year old or my 44-year old mind, I know we must stop using and consuming so much and tossing it. Especially as what we make to day, as opposed to what ancient cutures, who also tossed garbage, our modern stuff doesn;t break down.

A simple plastic bag, used for probably 3 minutes to cart your stuff from the store to the car, takes 1000 years to decompose. YUCK!

I strive constantly to be a consicence garbage producer; my longterm goal is to get to Zero Waste in my home and office.

So far, I am proud to say that I have recycled or composted 85% of my stuff at my Seattle home…and this past summer, in 2008, the year of Deb Goes Green, I upped my reduce, reuse, recyling incentive by taking the plunge and going from a 32 gallon weekly garbage can to a 16 gallon can (or, rather, a box- it’s square!)

Considering that ,when I bought my house, the can that came with it was a 64 gallon can on wheels, I’ve come far! (Of course, I had two housemates in the 64 gallon can days, but that still meant 21.33 gallons per person a week)

While I might not make Zero Waste, unless packaging policies take a huge turn, I do think that I can get my waste reduced even further- from 16 gallons a week to 16 every other week by Summer of 2009.

Fortunalty, City of Seattle Solid Waste is front-running this effort by increasing their curbside recyling capapcity and their compsoting capacity- in Marhc of 2009, youo’ll be able to compost meat scraps in your yard waste bin as well as vegetable matter, and you’ll be able to inlcude more kinds of plastic in the recycle bin.

YAHOO!!!!