Tag: recycling

Wait! Don’t Throw That Away!

I’m in love with my compost bin. I know that’s strange, but it’s true. I’m also mighty fond of the big blue recycle bin. The garbage bin, eh. But you should see me on Thursday nights rolling my full carts to the curb, lining them up like Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear, and the happy dance that follows on Friday when they’re empty again. I get so excited watching those big trucks roll up, stretch out their mechanical arms, raise my bin up high and dump everything in the back of the truck.

It was just a mild affection until the compost bin arrived a couple months ago. I finally had someplace to put my yard waste. I became a lawn-mowing, bush-trimming, food-composting maniac. I can’t wait to get the bins emptied so I can fill them up again, except for the garbage bin, which doesn’t get much in it anymore. Ooh, and last week I picked up this cool black food waste pail to hold things like my grapefruit rinds, tea bags and chicken bones until I can get them out to the Papa Bear bin.

My neighbor across the street does not compost or recycle. He burns his yard waste and throws everything else in the garbage. He sees no point in recycling. Add that to the list of topics we can’t discuss, a list that includes gun control, religion, politics, yoga, taking one’s dog to obedience school, and all the rest of my yuppie ideas. But he’s a good guy and has been helpful to me in my solitary life in the woods. Annie adores him, so we know he’s not all bad.

But I’m sticking to my stand on recycling. Have you ever been to a landfill? I have. As part of my reporter life, I have stood at the edge of these stinking piles of refuse and watched lines of garbage trucks dumping more and more. It’s horrible. The average American throws away four pounds of trash a day. That’s seven tons a year. We can recycle about 75 percent of our waste, but only about 30 percent actually gets recycled. All that stuff that goes into the landfill just stays there. A fact sheet from California State University Sacramento notes that it takes approximately 1 million years for a glass bottle to break down in a landfill. Plastics take at least 100 years, maybe as long as 400 years. Things like microwave ovens, iPads and tennis shoes, God knows how long it will take and what chemicals may be leaching into our air, soil, and water.

Think about how much you and I throw away every day and multiply it by the more than 7 billion people in the world. We are going to suffocate in our own garbage one of these days. We don’t have to. So much can be recycled and reused if we just do our part.

Our parents didn’t recycle, but they also didn’t produce and discard so much crap. We used to think we were doing our part if we tossed our stuff in the wastebasket or garbage can instead of on the ground. I remember our old Shasta camping trailer had a decal in the window that showed a picture of a bee and said, “Don’t bee a litter bug.” We weren’t. But now we know there’s more to it than that. If my 93-year-old dad can learn to recycle, anybody can.

I pray that someday we can find a way to reuse everything so that we no longer have any need for landfills. Meanwhile my neighbor thinks I’m an idiot. Too bad. It occurs to me I could sneak into his garbage can on Thursday night after he goes to bed and take out the recyclables, but then again he has a whole room full of guns and has told me that if a bear shows up, he will shoot it. So, maybe not. He might think I’m a bear.

I don’t usually get so preachy here, but as I said, I’m obsessed with my bins right now. I’d love to know how you feel about recycling and what you do about getting rid of your debris. Please comment.

The following websites offer some great information on recycling.

Recycling facts from MIT dept. of facilities

11 Facts about recycling from dosomething.org

Recycling Facts from Recycle Across America

The Attack of the Compost Cart or People are Biodegradable, Too

I’m weird. Who else do you know who yearns for a big green compost cart from the garbage company? Here in the wilds of South Beach, just outside Newport City limits, we watched our city friends and neighbors getting carts, but not here. I called.Compost cart

“When can we have ours?”

“You live in the county. Maybe next year.”

“But what am I supposed to do with my grass and tree trimmings in the meantime?”

“You can bag them up for the landfill or drive them to the dump.”

I chose to let them pile up in the yard, with vague plans to buy a burn barrel and fill the neighborhood with smoke and ashes like some of my neighbors do.

But finally, finally, the compost carts came to our neighborhood. Except my street, all four houses. I called.

The lady on the phone laughed. “Most people are calling to complain that they don’t want them. We will deliver your bin on Friday.”

Wahoo!

It was like waiting for Santa at Christmas. I looked out the window every five minutes until finally, a little after noon, there it was, a 96-gallon monstrosity that dwarfed my 65-gallon recycle cart and my 24-gallon garbage/landfill cart. I couldn’t wait to start piling stuff inside. Soon my yard would be so clean and neat. As soon as the rain stopped gushing down, I’d get to work.

Saturday morning, I put on my sweats and garden gloves, said hello to my pristine compost cart and started piling in branches, mostly out-of-control wild blackberry vines I had trimmed away from the house. Then I moved to the big pile that has been composting naturally on the side of the house for years and started shoveling in branches, dried-out hydrangea blooms, weeds and grass.

The trouble arose when I decided to move my three-quarters-full, chest-high cart without shutting the lid. Somehow, it became unbalanced and tipped forward. At the same time, the lid clopped me in the face and I fell in, banging my shoulder hard and my knee almost as hard. Down we went, me and the cart full of thorny branches. Bang! Crap! Ow! I was in the cart.

Slowly, I pulled myself out, hoping I wasn’t broken. I could feel my pulse in my cheek, an ache in my knee, a twisted-out-of-whack feeling in my back, and serious pain in my shoulder. Not good for a musician who would be playing the piano at church in a few hours. Gingerly I moved my limbs and determined that I was not broken, only bruised. I thanked God.

I pulled up my cart, dug my gloves out from under the greenery, and gently shut the lid. Okay, cart, you win this one, but I’ll get you on Thursday, when I stuff in more grass, add my grapefruit rinds, tea bags, and chicken bones and haul you to the curb with all the other carts. Then the garbage truck will lift you up, dump you out, and smack you back to the ground while I relax on my loveseat with the dog.

Today I’m fine except for a sore but functional shoulder. Sometimes I feel like a very small woman trying to maintain a very large home. A condo somewhere with other old widows and a staff of professional maintenance people is starting to look more appealing every day. Also, it occurs to me that someday I will be compost, too. But not yet. I have to mow the lawn. And yes, I do get the irony of trying to control what grows on a one-third acre parcel in the middle of the forest.