Where does your trash go?
I’m not entirely sure where the weekly garbage pickup ends up, but out here in the boonies, we make regular trips to the dump.
Anything outside of ordinary household refuse or those things designated as recyclable, must be disposed of by the homeowner. Either we have to make special arrangements with the disposal company, or we make a trip to the dump. Consequently, I have a more intimate knowledge of the amount of trash people generate than those who just lug things to the basement for a city super to handle.
It’s amazing—and somewhat horrifying. I live in Florida, remember. Where a restaurant is known as Hilltop throughout many management and actual name changes because it sits on what is essentially a bump in the road. Flat. The land is flat, flat, flat.
Out at the dump, though, there is a definite—and big—hill.
Landfill.
Every time I go there I think of future archaeologists excavating this giant mound to find out what the people of the twentieth and twenty-first century were like. And I feel it’s good we have written words. Although possibly, we might want to get some stone tablets out and do a little better than paper and ink and electrons to preserve our history.
All that aside, though, the dump is a strikingly well-organized place. You drive in right onto a scale where your whole car— contents, passengers and all—is weighed, and the checker-in gives you a card with a number on it. Then you make the rounds: hazardous waste over here, construction debris there. Metal, plastic, glass, ordinary garbage—all have their own areas. You empty your vehicle and drive out over another scale. You hand in your numbered card, and the checker-out cheerfully announces the poundage you’ve left behind. Each family is allowed 500 pounds per week.
500 pounds! Per week!
We’re going to be buried in trash if we can’t figure out better ways to recycle it.
* One of the iconic lines used by Bette Davis impersonators–from Beyond the Forest, based on the novel by Stuart Engstrand, screenplay by Lenore J. Coffee.
