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Wednesday, March 4, 2020

There is no "away"

This came to me recently, on a fairly nice day, driving somewhere and looking at the layer of litter along the berms. The township roads are lined with a film of empty bottles and wrappers.

Back when I worked for the township, every Monday the two road "guys" took the township truck out on litter patrol. You remember Tim, the super who nursed stray sunflowers and worked around pumpkins in the slag bin.  

Tim could not abide litter or people who treated our roads like their personal garbage cans. Our weekend visitors and their calling card. It is obvious Tim is no longer the road super.

All that trash the road crew brought back to our dumpster, to be thrown away. But there is no away.

And I'm guilty, too. Tomorrow I get my trash together for the week. Good intentions notwithstanding, week in and week out, I contribute half a bag of trash and a larger amount of recyclables. 

I used to be proud of that small amount to be thrown away. 

But no more.

There is no away.

36 comments:

  1. You are exactly right. It's like flushing the toilet which we can somehow believe is making everything magically disappear.
    There really are too many of us and no matter how hard we try, we just make too much garbage. It's horribly depressing to face that fact.

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  2. I think our recycling bins are fuller than our garbage or at least close to it. But yeah, we do consume a lot of stuff.

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  3. We have a coffee chain in Canada called Tim Hortons. It disgusts me when I see the number of their bright red cups along the roads. I'm not disgusted with Tim's, but their clientele are something else.

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    1. They have arrived in Scotland....gives a bit of colour variety on the grass verges, with the other chain takeaway boxes and cups 😠

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  4. I watched a woman today intentionally drop her litter on the pavement as she was walking in front of me. I resisted the urge to bark at her. My blue bin is filled with cans and glass and awful plastic.

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  5. I remember there being a lot less garbage going to landfill or recycling when households each had their own incinerator down in the back yard. They were smoky and some people deliberately lit theirs when the "nosy" neighbour had her fresh washing out on the line, but they were very effective at reducing the amount of rubbish put out for collection. The litter lining the roads is a different story, sheer laziness on the part of the litterers who can't be bothered finding a bin or taking the trash home to their own bin. When my kids were little, we kept a garbage bag in the car for any rubbish, then emptied it once we got home.

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  6. Ah yes, you are right of course. Yet how many of us would - or even could - go back to household practices that would produce no waste? It's not that easy, it's time-consuming and takes a great deal of personal energy expenditure. I don't think we can turn back the clock; instead, we have to find new ways to do things and support those with good new ideas. Recycling is better than the alternative, and plastics produce fewer carbon emissions due to being lighter to transport (trucking goods around accounts for 40% of emissions, I've read). Trash collection and burial in landfills is preferable to burning in kitchen stoves or backyard barrels, in my opinion, as the landfills can be dozed over and turned into green spaces. But burning is better than landfills if it's done in appropriate incinerators, and the heat captured and put to use. There are so many angles to consider.

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  7. You know what is really sad, at least here in Phoenix and its surrounding cities, is that recycling is getting to be so expensive so they are thinking of eliminating it. There are reports that recycle trucks just take the stuff and dump it like they would regular trash at the dump. We try to reuse and repurpose but sometimes its not possible to do so. I don't know what the solution is.

    betty

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  8. Sadly true. Our recycling bins are MUCH fuller than the garbage, but...

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  9. It’s worrisome here also. We can only recycle #1 and #2 plastics and newsprint or office paper. However, we’re on an island and it’s hard to know where to send things. I’ve seen tons of plastic particles on some of our beaches. It’s not good.

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  10. I hate it when people throw their trash on the roadside and sidewalks! I do not understand how people could do that instead of using a trash can.

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  11. It is much the same here in the UK Joanne - in the days when each village had its 'road man' who took care of the litter and took care of blockages which stopped surface water from lying on the road by digging little drains into the hedge bottoms everywhere was much tidier and as we knew the road man we kids knew that if we dropped litter he would be after us.

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  12. So true. Our 'away' is someone else's backyard, no matter how responsible we think we are being.

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  13. Hari OM
    I find it incredible that in this day and age of 'awareness' that so many folk are still able to just drop their litter and leave it for someone else to deal with... as for the recycling; it is true it is often not what we would wish, but I second Janny O's comment. The cultural shift required to get this properly under control is the big issue... YAM xx

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  14. Something to think about
    In July, compost material is on the recycle list. I remember the garbage truck man, the buckets in the ground, the flies. It's best to find a place that takes clean produce choppings than to put it in a bucket to wait, and rot.

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    1. We have that here; green waste bins where you put garden trimmings, grass from lawn mowing and all your fruit and veggie scraps too. The bins are collected once per fortnight, and taken to a composting site somewhere and several months later compost and mulch is sold back to the councils for the parks and gardens of the city.

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    2. Fruit and vegie scraps are banned from our Green Bins. It is garden waste only.

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  15. Today is our collection day. There is more recycling than ordinary rubbish these days. All that plastic.

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  16. I am happy to say that we have been able to reduce our garbage to very little indeed, and we work at it. The fact that people continue to littler, knowing all the downsides to trash everywhere, disturbs me. We are in so many ways a very unenlightened species.

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  17. I live in a subdivision and am always upset that people would throw their trash on other people's front lawns!! But then I see their cars filled with trash and am no longer surprised.

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  18. Our county is not well off, but I am glad that they have sorted the recycling collections...we have three different boxes which fit on one upright trolley. That is collected once a week. The other rubbish is now called plainly landfill...once every four weeks on a different day. This has improved things in the villages, but so much is still just dumped from cars.

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  19. I so agree. It will be tough to eliminate it all but onward we go!

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  20. It is the packaging of items that contribute to this mess we have. The mostly plastic item comes in plastic wrap which is put into a box with plastic filling.

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  21. you're right. our whole culture is built on consuming which results in a throw away mentality instead of conserving and repairing and saving. I used to recycle everything when I lived in the city and even after I moved out here where they only recycle a few things as I would send my recyclables back to the city with my daughter and I would only have a small bag or trash every week. then the next town over started a single stream recycling which was great. then they shut that down because I don't know why. now my trash has quadrupled. maybe one day future archeologists will be digging through our dumps and marvel at our wasteful culture.

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  22. Around here it is an uphill battle to get folks in our subdivision to clean up after their dogs. Some just let their dog poop anywhere he/she likes. Others bag Rover's poop in plastic but then just leave the bag on the sidewalk. ARGH!

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  23. You are so right, Joanne, why on earth are manufacturers not made more responsible for the litter? It drives me crazy. When I was mayor of a town, we had coastal clean up days and it was horrifying what we picked up, including all the detritus from boats, etc. But then putting it all in the town dump was awful too as we were so aware that this was the "away" for the birds and the 50 or so feral cats around. Plastic abounded.

    XO
    WWW

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  24. Tucson is just horrible. There seems to be a culture of pitching things out the car window, including glass bottles. The roadsides sparkle with the glass fragments that are everywhere. It's beyond belief.

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  25. I agree, Joanne. In Germany they make distinctions between "recycle", "compost", "paper", "glass" and "normal household garbage". Glas and paoer seem to work - plastic I read there are only 2% that are recycled... And that plastic becomes more and more - every blueberry is put into cellophane. And now, with online-purchase, the cardboard becomes a problem - our janitor put a sign up zhis week: closed garbage bin for cardboard for two weeks".

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  26. It is quite depressing thinking how wasteful we are and I am as guilty as the next person.

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  27. There is no end to the garbage we throw away daily....I thought when it was just the two of us that we would create less garbage but it isn't working out that way.

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  28. I cannot abide by trash in public places too. It really makes me wonder how people can be so disgusting. I too am aghast at how much garbage I produce from shopping and doing my best to ultimately lower it. Yesterday I checked out more silicon (reusable bags to replace baggies) and net bags for shopping. I didn't buy any from my local store because of high cost but I know where to get them next time. I did however buy a collapsible steel straw to carry around with me. It comes in it's own carry case and has a collapsible brush to clean it.

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  29. It is odd to consider how short-sighted we all were about plastic and what would happen to it. And still are.

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  30. How true. Even as a child I used to wonder where all the rubbish went. Now I know. It is still here. It never went anywhere.

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  31. You are so right - there is, and has never been, a place called "away". Plastic is so rampant now, that trying to be mindful when shopping and choosing products is not easy. But it is necessary.

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  32. People who throw things by the roadside are revolting.

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