Category Archives: Year Of No Garbage

How Many Crowns Does One Girl Need?

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Have you ever had a three-week old bag of pumpkin guts in your fridge, and wondered what the statute of limitations was on keeping it? Of course you have.

When this happened to me last week the situation was further complicated by the fact that I couldn’t just do what any sane 21st century American would do and throw it away. Instead, there I was, standing in the rain, covered in pumpkin goo to my elbows, washing out a white plastic garbage bag with the garden hose.

Who said life without garbage isn’t glamorous?

Air drying garbage bags also make good Halloween ghosts

The pumpkin guts, incidentally, had been sent home by a super-well-intentioned parent after my daughter Ilsa had been pumpkin carving at a friend’s and mentioned that she wanted to roast the seeds. But when the goo in question is three weeks old, I feel that ship has definitely sailed.

I SO didn’t want to clean this plastic bag of slimy goo out. I toyed with several impractical evasions: could I leave it in the fridge forever and hope no one noticed? Maybe it would eventually develop sentience and wander away on its own? Is there a 1-800 Goo-Hotline?

I had fantasies about classifying the goo-bag under our sole “No Garbage” exemption: “Health and Safety,” and sending it to the landfill along with the Band-Aids and feminine products. (I mean, does mental Health and Safety count?)

Then I imagined: gee! What if the bag just suddenly “blew away”? Then it would be somebody else’s problem. Darn it!

But no. I looked this perfectly ordinary kitchen garbage bag in the eye and understood that neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night could prevent me from having to deal with its existence. I shock myself when I really think about it… that this plastic will be around much longer than I, or my kids, or even my grandkids will be- and for what? So we could tote some pumpkin from one town to another on a whim, soon to be abandoned.

The guts are now happily decomposing in my compost pile; the plastic bag is enjoying a place of privilege on my clothes drying line. And it really wasn’t so bad, cold slime and all.

Meanwhile my daughter Greta, who is living in Brooklyn and studying to be an actress while avoiding the pandemic AND living without garbage, has her own albatrosses. She was in line to get Corona tested— again. (Her school now requires testing every two weeks.) This time the line was over an hour long and it was bitterly cold. The woman in front of Greta asked if she would save her place while she went to get a hot drink. In return she offered to bring Greta a coffee, which she gratefully accepted.

And then Greta realized: how would she drink her coffee while in line, surrounded by people waiting to get Corona virus tested, while wearing a mask? Normal people would solve this problem by forfeiting the coffee and quietly throwing it away at the next opportunity.

But what could Greta do?

“So I’m just carrying around this COLD COFFEE,” she explained later. Feeling ridiculous, she was toting a dangerously full beverage that was lukewarm and no longer appealing.

In desperation she considered giving it to the homeless guy who she passes every day- maybe he would like it? And then she thought: “HE’s not gonna recycle it- plus he’s the one who always swears at me, so that’s probably a bad idea anyway.”

Greta carried that cold cup of coffee with her all day. It got Covid tested with her. It took the subway back to her neighborhood. It went shopping with her. It patiently waited on the supermarket floor while she gathered up her groceries and then got picked up again. It walked home with her.

Finally she could dump it out and rinse the non-recyclable cup. And now?

“Now I let it sit on my kitchen counter. Forever,” Greta says with exasperation. “Like all the other things I have no idea what to do with. I have a whole collection of plastic forks living in a drawer that I have no idea what to do with. I’m thinking of making a crown.”

I feel her frustration, because this is the reality of plastic that garbage helps us deny: it’s not going anywhere. Throwing plastic away is a trick, a sleight of hand. All those disposables are still right here we just can’t see them.

Right now I’m reading the book Garbology by Edward Humes, which begins with the premise that Americans are addicted to garbage. I think this is very true, however I think it’s important to point out that it’s not just a matter of personal responsibility, it’s not just individuals who are addicted, but society as a whole, which has evolved to accommodate this addiction so completely that swimming against the tide of disposability is incompatible with normal day-to-day functioning.

Americans are addicted to garbage, but it’s worse than that: it’s like we’re all alcoholics living inside a bar. Even if we want to get away from our addiction, the surrounding environment actively encourages failure.

It’s enough to cause me to get a little desperate sometimes. Whether I am rinsing out a bag whose sole purpose in life is to be thrown away, or putting another wet paper towel in my purse because I forgot- AGAIN- not to take one in the public restroom, these are the moments that demonstrate to me how very far we’ve got to go as a society to start un-brainwashing ourselves.

I mean, how many plastic fork crowns does one girl really need?

I Am The Great Sticker Marauder

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I used to adore stickers. When I was in middle school I had a whole three-ring binder full of them: puffy stickers, heart stickers, stickers with pictures of unicorns gazing meaningfully at rainbows…

Today, my thoughts about stickers are much less fanciful. And occasionally involve adult language.

That’s because stickers are one of the more confounding elements when it comes to recycling. So many questions and so few answers. I wonder:

-When is a sticker a sticker… and when is it a glued paper label?

-Will a sticker interfere with the recycling process?

– Would I rather hang out with road kill than spend time removing stickers?

Stickers on glass aren’t a problem for recycling- but what about stickers on plastic?

I started thinking about this issue way back in May when I ordered my first Terracycle Plastic Packaging Recycling box. The website description admonished me not to send in food waste or hazardous material, which I figured I could handle.

But then it said, “Do not send in plastic with paper stickers.”

Oh. That was harder.

And now I have a confession to make. I did everything I was supposed to do: I cleaned my plastics; I made sure they were all completely dry. I sent my box in as densely packed with plastic as any box could ever be but… I did not remove any stickers.

I wondered… what would happen? Would they issue me the equivalent of a recycling speeding ticket? Would they send me my box of plastic back? Or worst of all, after all that effort from cleaning and drying to shipping and paying: in the end would they just discard my whole box into the landfill?

The Five Stages of Wish-cycling:

  1. Hope— I crossed my fingers. I really, really hoped my box was recycled.
  2. Rationalizing— After all, you used to have to remove paper labels from cans before recycling, and now you don’t anymore! Maybe it’s like that!
  3. Pretending I’m an expert— Well, they’re probably melting all these plastics down, so heat will just melt those labels too. Right?
  4. Anger— You know, how on earth are we supposed to remove all these sticky labels, anyway? It’s practically impossible! What is this my new freaking JOB? Sticker-remover??
  5. Acceptance— Who the heck knows?

The problem was I just didn’t know. There are so many things about recycling that we just don’t know, that prevent us from doing it correctly and efficiently, and I’ve pretty much spent this whole year trying to figure them all out.

Ultimately, I forgot about the sticker conundrum. That is, until recently, when I watched a video featuring a recycling expert who talked about removing stickers from the plastic films you put in the recycling bin at the supermarket. He said that sticker labels must be removed, or cut out. If not, the sticky part of the stickers will gum up the recycling machinery.

Of course, we are talking about two different things here. Plastic film recycling and Terracycle plastic packaging recycling are two different processes, so their answers to The Sticker Question may very well be different. But this was the first time I’d heard anything about sticker labels presenting a problem in plastic film recycling. There I’d been going along, blithely putting my bubble mailers and Tyvek envelopes into the supermarket bin all this time, never removing any of the shipping labels. Was that a problem?

Was I a sticker offender on multiple fronts?

So I emailed Stephanie, my e-friend at Trex who has been so helpful in the past on questions about plastic film recycling.

And then I contacted Terracycle too. Better to resolve all this sticker business once and for all. And Terracycle’s answer was actually surprising.

Customer Care Associate Angelica answered, “… oftentimes the reason we aren’t able to recycle the items is not so much due to the residue itself but rather the fact that many of these labels are made from paper-based products. (Emphasis mine) If you were to send in a clear tape, for example, this would be more easily processed through the Plastic Packaging box then something made with paper products.”

Now THIS was good news. At last, it seemed I could relax about all those label stickers in my Terracycle box, because I was pretty sure they were all plastic themselves.

And then I got more good news from Stephanie. At least as far as Trex is concerned, “paper labels are not an issue for Trex.  They can remain on the plastic packaging when dropped off for recycling.”

So either the expert video I watched was incorrect, or there are different kinds of plastic film recycling and it all depends who is collecting it. So now I have to figure out who exactly my supermarket is sending their plastic film to…?

Which brings me back to my previous point: Who has time for this nonsense? Nobody.

Recycling in this country isn’t supposed to actually work, I’m realizing. Recycling is broken.

At best, we only recycle 8% of our plastic in America. Eight percent.

Despite the sincere efforts of companies like Trex and Terracycle, these are mere drops in the ocean, an ocean of garbage Americans are tossing out every day. There simply isn’t enough of a standardized approach in this country to make recycling work in any real, effective and comprehensible way. Instead, we’re just supposed to think it works, so we keep buying the products made with materials we as a society don’t know what to do with.

Shut up and buy stuff!

At least I can relax a little on the sticker anxiety. It’s not the recycling machinery that has a problem… it’s just the whole damn system.

How I Learned to Stop Single Streaming and Love The Dump

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When we first moved to Vermont I was a little dismayed when folks said: “Oh! You live on the road to The Dump!”

The Dump. It just sounded… well, scatological for one thing. For another, there’s something kind of sad and forlorn about it. This is where we dump stuff.

Back then, we didn’t even use garbage cans- we just put full bags at the end of the driveway and the “garbage service” was two guys in a pick-up truck. Recycling was NOT included and therefore involved an elaborate and grimy system of different bins in our garage for a million different categories: aluminum cans, tin cans, paper, paperboard, corrugated cardboard, certain plastics, green glass, brown glass, clear glass. Whenever our bins got to overflowing we’d load up the car till nothing else would fit and dutifully cart it all over to the dump.

My New Favorite Place. Seriously.

Because I’d always lived in cities with garbage trucks that magically whisked everything away, I’d never before encountered an actual transfer station before. (This is the real name for the dump, which no one uses.) I was a little shocked: residents drive right alongside a series of enormous concrete bays into which we pour our different sorted categories of recycling. If you peer over the edge you can see the cascading piles of stuff on the lower level, a cavernous open space where the trucks of contractors drive in and out, dropping off construction debris. On most days the place is filled with the sounds of crashing metal and breaking glass.

But my trips to the dump were numbered: our two guys and a truck were bought out by bigger company, and then they too were bought out, and so on, until eventually it seemed like We Had Arrived. Now we had an actual mechanized garbage truck and two shiny plastic bins: one for trash and one for a magical new service called single stream recycling.

At last! It felt like finally, modern life has got this recycling thing figured out. All reusable materials go in one bin! How civilized.

In fact, the convenience and ease of “single stream “seemed to make so much sense that, over the years, I ignored all the big, unanswerable questions that kept cropping up, like:

  • If recycling works so well, why is there something called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
  • If China isn’t taking our recycling anymore, where is it all going?
  • How is it that my service accepts plastic numbers one through seven, when seven is “other”? How do you recycle “other”?

It would take an amazing amount of time for me to discover that much of single stream system is based on a lie, but that was because I SO didn’t want to hear it. I was addicted to a mirage.

Recently, in search of answers that are real, I’ve been back to the dump. Not much has changed there, except it is now privately owned. They still recycle, and still only accept that for which there is an actual market. No more mirage. No more dumping our problems on other, disadvantaged countries. This is real.

So here’s my Crazy New Plan: to stop my garbage service. As of right now we have only been using it for recycling anyway, and at my New Favorite Place recycling is free. I will save $57 per month, which comes to $684 per year.

I can then devote that money to recycling the remaining items my transfer station won’t take— in particular plastics #3-7— through Terracycle. So far this year I’m on my second “Plastic Packaging” box; at $134 per box that comes to $268 for ten months worth of recycling. Sure, I’ll be putting more things in them than before, but even if I’m using Terracycle twice as much, I’d still come out ahead by about $150.

There will be some kinks to work out— what about cartons? what about convincing my husband?— but you know, I’m excited. It’s one small step for me, one giant leap closer to Zero Waste. Sure, it’s one that comes with inconvenience, smelliness, and loud noises, but I’ve decided that’s part of the charm. It’s part of understanding that things that are worthwhile are worth being inconvenienced for.

At some point we are all going to have to choose: do we want a mirage, a delusion? Or are we willing to get our hands a little dirty at The Dump?