What’s in your garbage?
When people hear I take years to fill a load of garbage at home, after their incredulity passes, they often ask, “What’s in your garbage?”
It’s weird for people to be interested in your garbage. I mean, how often has anyone asked you what’s in your garbage? I guess it makes sense as a knee-jerk response, but the more interesting question isn’t what remains in mine but what fills up everyone else’s. Or nearly equivalently, what’s not in mine.
Frozen pizza boxes, ice cream containers, coffee grounds, takeout containers, food packaging of all types, and packaging from online purchases are things in many trash cans that aren’t in mine. All these things hurt people by polluting and don’t improve your life, except maybe the coffee grounds. They do, though, when put in the garbage as opposed to food scrap bin for composting.
Exercise to the reader: For a month or two, stop buying things that now fill up your garbage. If you don’t feel like doing the exercise, I’m not going to force you, but if you do, I predict you’ll be glad you did and wish you did earlier.
If you were thinking of buying canned food, consider making it fresh. If you were thinking about buying packaged food, buy it unpackaged (fresh even). Don’t by packaged anything. If that means you don’t get to eat something exotic, enjoy something local instead and stop poisoning people with your waste. If you were thinking about buying something online, consider not buying it or buying it local.
Mostly, consider not buying things that require you to poison other people through the environment. Yes, you can do without those things. No, you don’t need most of the things you say you need. You can make do with substitutes.
Here’s a picture of my trash when I was starting my third year on my current load. What’s in your garbage? What could you not buy?
One day it will be normal not to fill loads of garbage every week or faster. We’ll all take years to fill loads of trash and most of it won’t be plastic or other toxic things that take centuries to break down. Today, I guess it’s mostly me among Americans (also Bea Johnson and Lauren Singer). We hope you’ll join us, as do the world’s wildlife and poor people, who inhale and swallow your poison. Sorry if I wrote that too directly, but I get testy when people keep nosing around my garbage.
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