The garbage truck driver is in for a surprise when he comes down our street this Thursday morning, because he’ll notice something at the foot of my driveway he hasn’t seen all year: an actual bag of trash. The last time I put one out was the week after Christmas.
Like more than 100 municipalities around the state, my town uses a “PAYT” (Pay as You Throw) system of collecting refuse from its citizens. Residents are required to put all the non-recyclable items they’re discarding into official town-issued trash bags. The idea is to make people more cognizant of the amount of waste they’re producing. This would, at least in theory, increase recycling while at the same time reducing the cost individual cities and towns pay to the private companies they’ve contracted to dispose of their community’s rubbish. The good news: recycling is free, meaning the more items one puts in their recycling bin (rather than the trash), the better it is for the environment, and also for the involved individual’s bank account.
Personally I love the PAYT system. Last time I checked a package of ten of my town’s official green trash bags cost $25, meaning putting out one bag per week would annually set me back $125 and change.
I use generic bags in my kitchen trash can. When one is nearly full I collect everything from the other rubbish receptacles in the house, stick those scraps into it, and then compact the contents and deposit the now-fully-stuffed kitchen sack into the green 33-gallon town bag in the garage.
How many generic kitchen garbage sacks fit into a large municipality-issued trash bag depends on what sorts of things are being jettisoned. Since I don’t eat meat and the fish I consume is boneless, there aren’t any animal byproducts to dispose of, which helps keep my garbage can from smelling like, well, garbage. And since what I discard consists almost entirely of frozen food wrappers and paper products, compacting it with a simple push of the hand is both easy and (mostly) sanitary.
Another key component of my current waste removal system is a small, stainless steel compost bucket that comes equipped with an effective odor filter. Every biodegradable leftover (banana peels, apple cores, onion skins, etc.) goes into it, and when it’s full I bury the contents in the woods behind my backyard, making sure to do so in a hole that’s at least a foot deep. I also give what’s being interred at least 50 vigorous chops with my shovel before covering it. Digging a shallower hole, failing to chop sufficiently, or not adequately covering what I’ve buried would invite raccoons, skunks, and other scavengers I’d prefer not to share space with to make habitual visits to what could, without proper maintenance, become an unintentional all-they-can-eat backyard buffet.
I replace my generic kitchen trash bag whenever it gets filled, which generally takes two to three weeks.
So how many of those filled white bags can fit inside a big, green, town-issued one? Around six, or maybe seven if my trash compactor (a size 14 shoe with 170 pounds of human in it) is operating at peak efficiency. Stepping on sealed bags of trash primarily composed of paper is just as effective as any expensive mechanical device at reducing the cubic footage of one’s household waste.
Grossed out by the thought of using your shoe to flatten your trash? Don’t be. After all, leaving a large footprint on a full bag of garbage is a lot better than leaving a larger-than-necessary carbon footprint on our already-beleaguered home planet.
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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