03201 Waste and Cycling of Resources

The case for recycling is strong. The bottom line is clear. Recycling requires a trivial amount of our time. Recycling saves money and reduces pollution. Recycling creates more jobs than landfilling or incineration. And a largely ignored but very important consideration, recycling reduces our need to dump our garbage in someone else's backyard. — David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

Here’s a fun project for this week.

Keep all your trash and carry it around with you. No, I'm not talking about all those low-life friends of yours. This proposal is for real trash — paper, plastic, stuff that you throw in the garbage.

OK, you can leave out any wet trash so you don’t create obnoxious odors. You can put stuff into the recycle bin. But hanging onto all the rest of your personal trash for a week, and carrying it with you wherever you go, teaches an important lesson. If you don’t do it, no permaculture police will come knocking at your door. You might not learn a lesson that needs learning at a visceral level however.

Among the various functions stacked on this project, you will create less trash this week. As the week progresses, and you have more trash on hand, you will find ways to create less trash so you have less to carry with you.

POP ASSIGNMENT: List the various functions stacked on this assignment. What beneficial connections does it have to other functions/activities of your life?

Many people are oblivious to the amount of trash we produce. They may do some token recycling, that’s about as far as they will go.

We don’t want to think about the trash that organizations, institutions, and businesses produce “on our behalf”.

As you go out and about, check out the size of the commercial waste containers behind the locations you go, the schools you attend, and the places where you worship.

Take a sniff of the garbage containers of restaurants and you’ll learn that they don’t compost their organic waste, it just goes into the landfill. Do this in the middle of the summer. Tasty. Talk with the owners or managers of your local restaurant and encourage them to sign up with a compost service or compost their own food waste. Tell them how unappetizing the stench is that wafts from their dumpster.

The basic lesson to learn is — Reduce, reuse, repurpose, rot, return, repair, recycle, renew, refuse, regenerate, make over, make do, do without.

Reduce your use of stuff. Look for items with minimal packaging. Carry your own reusable bags so you don’t bring home paper and plastic bags. One of the advantages of the after market at swap meets, flea markets, and thrift stores is minimal packaging. If you don’t accumulate junk in the first place, you have less trash in the second place.

Re-use and re-purpose items. Years ago, when I was about 12, I was at my grandparents house, and after lunch, I threw an empty pickle jar into the trash. My grandfather reached down into the trash can, pulled out the jar, and said, “Bobby Max, we already paid for that jar. Why would you want to throw it away?” Good question indeed. In my immature understanding, I thought the glass jar, now empty of pickles, was useless trash. My grandfather, who lived through the Depression on a farm in southwest Oklahoma, knew better. Now I know that too. In my kitchen, we repurpose jars for many uses. We drink juice, milk, and water from jars that once held, pickles, mayo, and jam. Jars on shelves hold pasta, rice, flax seed, spices, and other miscellaneous cooking ingredients. In the utility room, small jars — with lids! — hold screws and nails, thus keeping them from getting jumbled around.

Rot! Compost all compostables! Because a rind is a terrible thing to waste.

Return! If you buy, look for products that can be returned for recycling or reprocessing when their useful life is over, or that can be refilled.

Repair. Don’t buy something if it can’t be repaired. If you decide to not buy something, it can be helpful if you contact the manufacturer and explain why.

Recycle. If you can’t use it, recycle it. Paper, cardboard, glass, metals, and plastic are recyclable. You need a materials cycling center to sort and store such items pending their pickup or delivery. In some areas, non-profit organizations collect such items with the proceeds benefitting their causes.

Refuse. Some things should just be refused. Straws. Styrofoam. Plastic bags. Etc.

Regenerate! Remember the laws of thermodynamics! Every time we do something, a little of the usefulness disappears forever to us. So we not only need to be energy conservative and to use less stuff, we need to learn how to regenerate systems so that we have what we need, without destroying the planet, going into the future.

Make over. Use materials you no longer need to make items you do need. Make Christmas cards from junk mail and magazines. Make crafts from cans and bottles. Make dish rags and cloths from old clothes and make quilts from scraps of fabric.

Make do. Or as all of my grandparents and great aunts and uncles used to say, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are”, sometimes said as “what-cha do with what-cha got.”

Do without. Practice voluntary temperance in your use of material goods. Just because you can afford something, does not mean that you should buy it, have it, use it, keep it, and then waste it.

The problem with trash is that almost everywhere, the system subsidizes trash at every step of its journey, from pick up at your curb to burial in a landfill or burning it in an incinerator. Because disposal is artificially cheap — and many of the costs are shifted elsewhere, "externalized" as the economists say — there are no financial incentives built into the system to discourage making more trash. So we and everyone else continue merrily on our way, destroying useful resources and burying them in landfills.

Strategies to address this problem can include —

Mandatory return fees for “disposable” bottles and cans.
Mandatory curbside recycling (including sorting of recyclables by class),
Municipal composting including mandatory composting of restaurant and household organic wastes.
Mandatory fees on the amount of packaging, based on its cyclability and volume.
Market pricing for garbage removal and disposal.

Personal actions include —

Shopping the after-market,
Always using reusable bags when shopping.
Spending your money (“voting with your dollars”) at businesses that do a good job of recycling. Not spending your money at businesses that don't recycle or compost.