One Man’s Trash

Friday is garbage day on my street: the general garbage, not recycling which is Thursday. More accurately, it is garbage day for those on my street who have contracted with the same refuse collection company as I have. As in most places, the collection trucks beat rush hour traffic (not that there really is any during the Covid restrictions) by making their rounds at or before first light. Since I don’t much like stumbling out of bed at 5 a.m. (the days are long gone when I was still up at that hour) in order to wheel the bin down the dark tree-lined 200 feet (61 meters) of my driveway to the street, my preference is to wheel it down there the previous evening. There are two problems with that plan: raccoons and bears. Neither show up regularly, but they do often enough to take them into account.

snacking in the driveway

Raccoons are pesky rather than a serious problem. They rarely are able to tip the bin. They’ll open the lid, climb inside, and toss out some trash that I’ll have to pick up later when retrieving the empty container, but nothing worse than that. A bear, however, will do whatever it damn well pleases with the bin and its contents; it is apt to knock over the container, remove the bags, spread them open in a clear spot, and nose through them for something edible. The clean-up is neither quick nor easy; it’s bad enough in my own driveway, but far worse on the street. Yet, bears show up on my property no more than once or twice a month (as far as I notice), so odds are I will get away with it if I put out the trash on a Thursday night. To quote Dirty Harry, “You've got to ask yourself a question: 'Do I feel lucky?'”

My parents commented to me back in the 90s that they never put garbage curbside when they were kids in the 1930s. (They also never mowed the lawn: sheep and goats took care of that.) Urban areas had well developed garbage removal, of course, but it was a different matter outside of town. My mom lived on a dairy farm. My dad (though his father was primarily a builder) also lived on a small farm. Trash such as old rotting lumber would be piled in an out-of-the-way corner of the property where it could decay naturally. For paper, cans, rinds, and such they, like all their neighbors, dug holes; there wasn’t as much of that kind of garbage anyway. A large item, such a couch that was beyond all hope of repair, could be self-carted to the local dump, which might be municipal (typically free to residents) or private (very cheap). The local dump was still a thing when I was a kid. Not everything dumped there proved kind to the groundwater beneath it however, which is why they were shut down starting some 50 years ago in favor of (recycling centers aside) better engineered clay-lined landfills and “resource recovery facilities,” as the State of NJ euphemistically calls its incinerators. The incinerators do generate electric power, so to that extent they are recovering something. Unsurprisingly, trash pick-up has become expensive, and price increases continue to far outstrip general inflation. My bill has quadrupled in the past 20 years even though the volume has gone down as the list of items allowed in the general trash stream gets ever more restrictive.

I’ve ordered a few dumpsters over the years for things not suitable for either curbside trash or recycling such as construction debris, e.g. the old shingles from when I reroofed my barn. Dumpsters also get pricier each year, but they are still the most cost-effective way to dispose of large weights and volumes. I always find plenty to put in them, but there is not always a clear line between what is garbage and what is not. The answer is largely circumstantial. I frequently wrestle with the question. I’m not a pack rat. I haven’t added to net quantity of stuff in my possession in decades. The general trend of incoming versus outgoing long has been toward the latter, yet I hesitate more than I should to thin out what left behind by my parents whose home it was previously. My dad was a builder, so the barn and the attic over the garage are full of random items such as screens that don’t fit any windows, non-standard size doors, nails, lag bolts, joist hangers, siding, PVC drain pipes, shingles, cases of 50-year-old passage locks, and so forth… literally including a kitchen sink. With the pine trim stored over the garage I could completely trim a 4000 square foot (372 square meter) house with the caveat that no two rooms would match; very likely not all the trim in a single room would match, and most of it would be pieced. Some of this stuff could be sold on Craigslist, it is true, but for so few dollars as scarcely to be worth it. Besides, I rather like having on hand, for example, 40 different kinds of nails up to and including 60p spikes. I do use them. I’ll just never use all of them, or even a substantial percentage. The truth is, when the time comes to sell this place (whether by me or…well…someone after me) most of the stuff will end up in a dumpster – and perhaps much of it from there to a resource recovery facility.

kitchen sink

People have been generating garbage since they became people. In a millennium or two, archeologists (if any exist among the robots who will have replaced us) likely will find our landfills to be valuable sources of information about 21^st century biological beings. Present day archaeologists spend much of their time digging through middens, as they prefer to call old garbage dumps. Prehistoric shell middens can be found on six continents along ocean fronts and lake shores. An artificial hill (Monte Testaccio) covering 20,000 square meters in Rome is an ancient dump and is made of no fewer than 25,000,000 broken amphorae, the standard Greco-Roman ceramic shipping containers. Even today the amphora shards retain residues of what they once contained, thereby giving insight into Roman commerce. A huge Roman-era 70-meter-deep layered landfill with much more varied trash (including food cast-offs such as fruit pits and fish bones) was recently discovered outside the walls of Jerusalem. Yuval Gadot, who led the 2013-14 dig, commented, “It looks like there was a mechanism in place that cleared the streets, cleared the houses, using donkeys to collect and throw away the garbage.” Sounds familiar. I wonder if the donkeys came by at dawn to beat rush hour.

Garbage Truck: Written by Beck. Performed by Michael Cera, Alison Pill, Mark Webber in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World