Category Archives: Year Of No Garbage

Top 10 Things I Have Learned from 6 Months of No Garbage

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This week is kind of a big milestone. We are officially ONE HALF of the way through our Year of No Garbage. We are very excited about it, and by this I mean that I am very excited about it.

Ever wonder what six months of accumulated caps looks like?

In honor of the occasion I have compiled a list of the…

Top Ten Things I Have Learned So Far:

1. Plastics are made out of fossil fuels.

Maybe everyone already knew this but me. What astounds me about this fact is that oil is at the heart of so many bad, bad things: the source of not only the greenhouse gases that accelerate global warming, BUT ALSO the plastic pollution of our oceans, AND the micro-plastics in our drinking water. Shall we get into the debate about chemical fertilizers? It is also responsible for taking Friends off of Netflix. Probably.

2. There is no such thing as “not recyclable.”

It’s just a matter of the lengths we are willing to go to in terms of cost and effort.

3. SO MANY plastics can be recycled in the supermarket plastic bag recycling bin.

This is a deeply underused resource that everyone should know about. Bread bags, plastic overwrap, Ziploc bags, produce bags, bubble wrap and plastic mailers can ALL be recycled in these bins. Tell everyone.

Six months of “Assorted Plastic Thing-a-ma-bobs”

4. Just because something is labeled “compostable” doesn’t actually mean you can compost it.

Amazingly enough.

5. “Chemical Recycling” is a euphemism for “burning garbage.”

Of course it is.

6. Where our recyclables go, now that China no longer accepts them.

Municipalities have had to decide between paying a small fortune for recycling companies to take recyclables and sending them to the landfill. I don’t like recycling’s chances.

Six months of Saran Wrap despite the fact that everyone is instructed to say they’re highly allergic to it

7. No matter what the internet says, you can’t just send your old toothpaste tubes to Terracycle.

But if you can deal with their system, you can pay them to recycle everything from toothbrushes to cigarette butts. This is ninja-level recycling.

8. You can’t recycle shredded paper, but you can compost it.

I know, right? And contrary to popular belief, you can compost meat, cooking oil and bones too. Just use a container (to keep pests down) and give it time.

Six months of wine corks being Pinterested

9. No one ever died from paper towel deprivation.

Yet.

10. The key to living a more earth-friendly life— or one of them— is slowing down and being thoughtful.

Ask questions. Make a phone call. Fix things. Go out of your way. Think twice. Three times. Don’t give up on objects quite so fast.

 

Things I have yet to find out:

1. Why aren’t plastics infinitely recyclable, like aluminum or glass?

2. What is the difference between “biodegradable” and “compostable”?

3. Can anything good be done with thermal-paper receipts? Or packing tape? Or broken glass? Old cassette tapes? Here’s a tough one: photographic prints. Remember “free double prints”? Ugh.

4. Can hard plastic with no recycling numbers be recycled? Or is it from another dimension?

5. Is taking out the compost really “the grossest job in the world”? Or is that just what my kids say?

 

I have six more months to figure these things out and more. What Garbage/Recycling/Zero Waste questions do YOU have? Let me know and I’ll try to answer them.

Have a happy Fourth of July!

No One Expects the Garbage Inquisition

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I’ve been having a hard time lately. The dips in my emotional rollercoaster have been, well, deeper. Harder to struggle out of. The other day I felt so depressed for a while I had trouble maintaining a normal telephone conversation. I just wanted to put the phone down and walk away. Maybe go to sleep.

We’ll get to THIS travesty in a minute

Of course, at this particular historical moment in time, with the Corona-warming-global-virusing-frog-raining-race-rioting Apocalypse going on and all, it is incredibly, incredibly likely that I’m not alone in this, just as it’s also likely that I have absolutely no right to be having a hard time. I mean, I know that I’m extremely lucky to be who I am, where I am, with enough food, shelter, safety, loved ones, probably a few too many dresses, definitely not enough bookshelves, and no murder hornets in sight… so what’s my problem, exactly?

I’ve had this thought before and I will have it again: people are suffering, people are dying and you’re sad? Who the hell are you to be sad?

The best part is that then, of course, I feel worse.

My rational brain knows that even people who have won the actual lottery can be sad sometimes, feel overwhelmed, depressed, or despondent. Sometimes they can’t even say why.

For me, I know one thing that contributed: The Chicken Who Lived? Died. This is one of our teenage chickens whose beak I wrote about being torn off by our friendly neighborhood raccoon. (Although I know raccoons can be lovely, intelligent animals, we have come to regard our personal backyard raccoon as the Ted Bundy of the animal kingdom.) After our chicken managed to survive The Incident for two whole weeks we had grown quite fond of her spunky attitude. We made the Huge Mistake of naming her (“Queenie”), and despite her beaklessness she had learned to feed herself again, and went hopping about the metal tub we were separating her in impatiently trying to escape. She had convinced everyone, even the vet, that she was going to make it: return to a normal life in the coop eating bugs and arguing over stray feathers. Then she developed a fever, stopped eating and died in a period of 24 hours.

Just like that.

Unfortunately Queenie wasn’t the only thing around here that seems suddenly ready to die; another is my ten year-old car. As it turns out I am a Bad Car Mom. I don’t remember to go for oil checks, ignore the check-engine light, NEVER wash my car, forget to get it inspected for never mind how long. And all of this has finally caught up with my poor, neglected Subaru, which at the quasi-youthful age of 160,000 miles is now lurching alarmingly whenever I press on the gas pedal.

Apparently this is very bad.

Meanwhile, as we inch ever-closer to the half-way mark, things have continued on a fairly even keel in the No Garbage department, although there are assuredly days when I feel I might lose my resolve. These are usually the days that are hot, sticky and uncooperative; the evenings when the various food wrappers that are necessitated by three-meals-at-home-a-day-because-quarantine have accumulated by the side of the sink each awaiting their own separate rub down and spa treatment and I’m not sure I can quite face it.

“Wow. We take such good care of our garbage,” Ilsa marveled one evening as I draped a freshly massaged and buffed piece of Saran Wrap atop the overflowing dish drainer. We do indeed.

Every once in a while there’s a bit of excitement when I become possessed by the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition: “SO WHO PUT AN ENTIRE ROLL OF SOGGY TOILET PAPER IN THE ‘HEALTH AND SAFETY GARBAGE’? HMMM? COME ON! OUT WITH IT!” I don’t know why everyone looks at me like I’m crazy when this happens.

Once Greta casually mentioned throwing out (!!!!) an empty shampoo bottle because she and her boyfriend have been staying in our AirBnb guesthouse during quarantine and she had heard someone say at some point that the guesthouse “didn’t count.”

“Are YOU an AirBnb guest?” I asked her with poorly concealed exasperation.

“No…?

“Then it counts.”

Nope. I’m not above Garbage Shaming.

My husband Steve has been known upon occasion to skirt the spirit of the project too, if not the actual rules. I’m sure he finds it adorable when I harangue him about putting the PERFECTLY RECYCLABLE TOOTHPASTE BOX in the much-discussed Health and Safety Garbage, for the reason that brushing our teeth falls under “health.” Or, discarding his foil photographic film wrappers in the “can be used for kindling” bag that we keep for campfires.

“This isn’t paper, darling!” I call to him across the kitchen, waving the foil wrapper at him as daintily as if it were a linen hankie.

“It does burn though, my love” he smiles back at me.

“But my dearest,” I say, battling my eyes sweetly, “IT SHOULDN’T.”

So to sum up:

I’m a good garbage mom,

a bad car mom,

a sad chicken mom, and

apparently even the Corona-warming-global-virusing-frog-raining-race-rioting Apocalypse will not deter… the Toilet Paper Inquisition.

 

Garbage, Garbage Burning Bright

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So last night I had another garbage dream and I knew you’d want to hear about it.

In this dream, I was at the house of a friend, but for some reason there were huge, stinky garbage bags all over the place. Suddenly, as happens in dreams, we realized that the garbage bags were going to explode, sending garbage shrapnel everywhere! So we had to quickly get them all outside before that happened. Then we figured out that if you threw the bags into the air and shot them, they’d disintegrate. Then a large bear lumbered into the doorway and further panic ensued. Someone shot him and he deflated like a punctured balloon and…

Well, that was the end of the garbage portion of the dream, anyway.

But I liked the dream-idea that it might be possible to vaporize our garbage into nothingness, if we could just find the right way. And in the country, back before the invention of plastics, there was a way to do this. It was called the “burn barrel.”

Because I grew up in the suburbs, I’d never heard of burn barrels before moving to Vermont. Essentially you put all your trash into a 55-gallon drum and light it on fire. In our town the subject had come up because it’s illegal, yet people we doing it anyway, primarily because every other way of disposing of trash here costs money, but burning is free.

So it turns out this was a bad idea

This might’ve been relatively fine a century ago, but when you introduce plastics to the mix all kinds of terrible things happen. Burning plastics create dioxins, PCBs, and something called furans, all of which are all kinds of bad— toxic, endocrine disrupting, carcinogenic— not to mention leaving behind heavy metals such as lead, mercury and arsenic.

Okay, so burning garbage is bad. Got it.

Except, since this project began I’ve learned that the two ways contemporary society deals with garbage are landfilling and incineration. Wait- but what about the furans? What about reproductive, immunological, and developmental problems? What about the frogs biologists keep finding with both sets of genitals and three legs?

Turns out the reason it is ostensibly okay for some people to burn garbage— but not you at home in your backyard— is that compared to an industrial incineration facility the temperature in a domestic burn barrel is relatively low. Which, experts online say, means more stuff gets vaporized out of existence. Plus they have fancy filters that “scrub” the exhaust emitted.

I don’t know about you, but I’m skeptical. Three legged intersex frogs don’t lie.

It’s true. We don’t lie.

Even if higher temperatures burn cleaner than a barrel in my backyard, that still doesn’t mean they burn clean. Everyone seems to agree that there is always some degree of VBS (Very Bad Stuff) left over from incineration of garbage, which ends up both as gasses in the air and as ash in the landfill.

As if all this toxic plastic burning weren’t bad enough, what’s worse still is that there is clear evidence that incinerators are much more likely to be built in low-income communities and/or communities of color. So apparently we’re fine with putting poison into the environment, as long as it takes place in someone else’s neighborhood?

The good news is that incineration plants are wildly unpopular, not to mention extremely expensive to install and maintain. (The Tischman Environment and Design Center produced a whole report about the decline of waste incineration which you can read here.) Where there used to be hundreds of industrial incineration plants across the country, there are currently only 73 left in the United States, and the number is falling all the time. In 2017 only 13% of U.S. trash was incinerated.

The bad news, however, is that there’s an effort underway to change all that. Since 2018 when China decided to stop taking recyclables from the United States, the plastic and incinerating industries have been ramping up promotion of something called “chemical recycling” using “plastic-to-fuel” technology.

The AEPW website features many pretty pictures of water

A gaggle of major corporations, including PepsiCo, Exxon Mobil, Proctor and Gamble and Shell, have combined to form the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) and contributed over a billion dollars to the initiative. If you check out their website you’ll find lots of pretty pictures of the ocean, text about “Swift Action and Strong Leadership” and not a whole lot of specifics. Perhaps this is because, according to research by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), the true goal of AEPW is to reclassify waste incineration as recycling.

The GAIA website features actual information

On the EPA website they call it “Energy Recovery from Combustion.”

This is not recycling. This is a fancy name for burning plastic. But can you truly recover energy from burning plastic? Yes.

Another linear, dirty, greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuel, with the added bonus that it is exceptionally inefficient.

Yay?

Though we might like to, we can’t burn our way out of the garbage problem. So I guess incineration isn’t the magic bullet from my dream.

Instead I think it’s the bear that shows up to make everything worse.