To those who say America has been asleep, lulled by television and cheap electronic toys from China, unaware of what has been taken from us and not moved to protest, I give you Portland, Oregon. Here, sir, we have had a sustained demonstration of outrage and indignation for over five weeks now. We will not be ignored; we will stand up for what is right, we will demand redress. We have just had another change in our garbage service inflicted upon us and we aren’t going to take this sitting down.
Yes, we are maintaining a proud tradition of civic whinging that goes back centuries, from when the Romans put together the entire aqueduct system for water delivery. Oh fine, the collective populace said. And here I am with a slave, eight daughters and a fortune in buckets–what do you expect me to do with them?
We citizens were not consulted, unless you count that extended public input process and the publicized three-month trial study. Because if we had been properly consulted, we would have made clear our desire to have the mounds of debris from our daily lives suctioned out at the curb on a weekly basis, just like always. Only cheaper, because we’d strip the fat from the bloated bureaucracy. If the government absolutely must tinker with our garbage service, it could pave a turn-around up at the edge of the national forest where we dump our mattresses and old refrigerators.
Because left alone, dammit, we are a productive people. We produce unfathomable volumes of crap every day, and if the government would just take it away and quit spending money on pamphlets about it, we could produce even more. The pamphlets purport to educate us about the changes in our garbage service.
Do you know where your garbage goes?
Yes. Away. It goes away.
We used to jam everything, rocks and concrete and stinky fish and dead possums and everything, in one big can and the trucks rumbled up the alley and made it all go away. But that isn’t good enough for the nanny state. No, some bureaucrat with absolutely nothing better to do decided to make the trucks come up street side, and we got ugly yellow crates to put our cans (flattened, labels removed), glass (separated), and newspaper (bagged up) in. They would never have gotten away with it had they not anticipated the uproar and brainwashed our children about recycling via socialized education, and the little scolds did their dirty work for them. That’s right: they made us do more work, and charged us more for the privilege. You know, a person who works all day long might want to have a moment to relax and have a couple dozen Buds and toss the cans in the garbage, but no. What’s next? Will we have separate containers for white Styrofoam peanuts and colored Styrofoam peanuts?
No. Actually, now we’re going to give you a big blue bin and you can start tossing all your recycling into it without sorting it. Oh, and we’re also going to give you a big green bin for your yard debris, and we’ll pick it up and compost it every other week.
Fabulous. Now we have two big ugly bins and one smaller one plus our original garbage can. We don’t even have any yard debris. We’ve got Mexicans for that. They cart it away and, I don’t know, put it in tacos or something. Can we put our Christmas tree into the yard debris bin?
Not unless you chop it up first, and the trunk is under four inches in diameter.
I see the government’s War On Christmas is in full swing. All right. We’ll ignore the yard debris can as long as you keep hauling off our garbage once a week.
About that. We’re going to give you a free countertop compost container and you can now fill up your yard debris bin every week with all your kitchen scraps, including bones and meat and napkins and pizza boxes and crab carcasses, but we’ll only pick up your other garbage every other week.
How’s that supposed to work? Stuff smells.
Well, the stuff that smells is what you can now put in your yard debris can. Which will get picked up every week, just like your regular can used to be.
We don’t want to put our stinky food in a different can. We want to put it in the old can. We don’t want government busybodies telling us what to do.
We told you what to do before, when we came down the alley and picked up all your crap in the giant can on a particular day for a particular price.
Yeah, but that was the arrangement our forefathers got set up for us when they told us to cast off the potato peels of oppression. That was okay.
………………………………………
Call me contrary, but I like all the changes. To me they indicate that the government workers I hired to figure things out have, in fact, figured things out. They have studied the problem of diminishing landfill space with a mind to what is environmentally sound, and they have come up with solutions that will benefit us as a society. That, to me, is what a government of the people should do. It’s worth celebrating.
And once we winnow out all our food crap and our paper crap and our recyclable crap and our tin foil and our glass and see what is left to put in our garbage cans, we will discover that it is mostly huge piles of plastic crap that we can barely avoid acquiring, because that is how all our goods are packaged now. And we might then be moved to do something about all that packaging, at the source. A few years back, some of our representatives tried to introduce legislation to do just that. But the packaging producers got wind of the plan and poured enough money into the legislators that the problem went away.
That is the other way a government can be run. Kinda stinky.
Yeah, that pesky government is always up to something. You gotta keep your eye on them. Next thing you know you will be delivering your own mail.
Sad but true, despite efforts and appearances, over half of recycled material still goes to the landfill. There isn't enough demand for it and when it comes to plastic, it's cheaper to make it from scratch due to the cost of oil. It's a conundrum. But I, for one, am ready to strangle someone every time I have to cut something out of it's nearly impregnable plastic container. Enough already!
Don't get me started on garbage…sore point over here.
Murr, I've got worms! Composting worms that is, they take care of most of our stinky stuff, prawn heads excluded, but some unconscionable people put those into the bin in the local park under cover of darkness, something I would never do!
Sadly, I have to 'fess up and say that my life is so boring that sorting the recyclables is the highlight of my week.
Absolutely priceless! Thanks for a great post.
That's some very sophisticated garbage you've got there, which is no less than I would expect of a trash fashion-forward place like Portland.
We've finally been given our very first inadequate recyclable container here on the SC coast. I've found that, at the rate two careful and self-denying seniors produce stuff, it will hold about every third thing that's supposed to go in it. Mr. Mature, the engineer, has figured out how to build up the sides of the container with flattened cardboard boxes in order to approximately double its capacity. God, we're bored.
A sign I saw at the Farmers' Market once: "Don't throw things away. There is no Away." Recycling is cool. Here in Bellingham we are going to stop plastic bags from being used in the grocery stores, but as you say, everything is still wrapped in plastic. Sheesh.
education camps. that's what the people of Portland need! teach them about garbage! immerse them in the garbage! they'll get it. or go back to camp…
i love my curbside recycling service – but have to wonder what happens to it. pretty sure that the plastic (as Mr. Charlston said) still ends up in the landfill…
We in Honolulu throw our stuff into 3 bins – green, blue, and grey! No problem for me! Just wonder if there will be adequate space at Christmas time!
Well, those packaging peanuts really should be separated you know. We can't have trash people with peanut allergies going into anaphylactic shock….
The closest thing to recycling we've got here in Bubbaville is that the same ol' white guys keep getting elected to public office.
Talihina is as far away from Portland as one might get–philosophically that is. After the first couple of weird looks I got from asking where the recycling can was, I gave up. Here we have plastic bags only and are proud of it by god.
Pootie seems to be doing a fine job keeping an eye on the garbage situation. Maybe it's time for Pootie to go cast a suspicious eye on some of them guvmint legislators. Just to let 'em know they're being observed as they do the peoples' work.
haha @ "yes away!! It goes away!!." I couldn't agree more…. though here in Portland I have a feeling it gets taken somewhere where someone talks to it about its feelings before it gets dumped!
Colored Styrofoam peanuts should be segregated. They were not meant to mix. They prefer it that way, too. Harrumph.
I have the same suspicions about what happens to the recycling that Mr. Charleston does. But I didn't even think that there are still places where people can't recycle. We're in a bubble here–a bit blue bubble at that.
I for one am amazed at the sheer volume of stuff like junk mail and phone directories that I still get, even in the internet age. I then have to do the work of taking it all to the paper-recycling bin. Millions of others are presumably doing the same with thousands of tons of this stuff. Surely it would be more efficient for the junk mailers and phone-book mongers to ship their output en masse to the paper-recycling centers, cutting out the middleman — but no, it has to be spread all over the city and then re-consolidated.
Murr…..wonderful blog. Just home from hospital so do not have the energy to rave properly.
Fab treatise on garbage…oh, I do admire you.
Great stuff. I agree with every word. Well, maybe not literally 'every' word, but you get my drift. We go through the same thing here. My only gripe is that the bastards who are supposed to pick up the recyclable stuff in the blue bins often don't show up until about 7:30 pm on a trash/recycling day and that means if it's windy the whole street gets a nice dusitng of old newspapers, etc.
That could never happen here. Wet newspapers don't fly.
LO'S BACK! LO'S BACK!
I would love to have a pick up for the garden waste. We have the regular garbage (kitty litter and the like) picked up weekly, recycling (newspapers, cans, bottles) picked up fortnightly but the green waste has to be taken to the dump. Or sneaked into the regular bin. If you do the right thing and take it to the dump a dump person goes through it telling you what can go in green waste (free) and what can't. Guess which pile is bigger. So I dump my green waste in my bin, my neighbours bin, their neighbours bin …
City picks up yard waste here, or you can take it to several places for removal to landfill for composting. Then you can go BUY the finished compost that you provided the raw materials for at said landfill or BUY it in plastic bags at local nursery/greenhouses.
I love it when you get all tongue-in-cheek, Murr. Good one! Yrs truly, the Compost Queen.
Turning waste to energy can solve so many problems. My husband (former astrophysicist and contractor to NASA et al. in computational fluid dynamics)spent his last decade developing an improved process to turn most garbage and combined recycling/yard waste(or any plant matter)into ethanol or other products. The process was proved at UC-Davis w/ part DOE money and help, but we couldn't raise the money for half of the cost of proving it at pilot plant level. Too many of the cellulosic biomass to fuel technologies have had the same problem. The techologies are complex and cost millions. Investors want to kick the tires of working systems, so progress is slow.
Check out catalogchoice.org to find out how to stop pesky phone books, catalogs, etc. It's easy.
True, true…as a former mailman I would like to mention that the junk mail pays the bills for the USPS, even at the reduced postage rate–it's been subsidizing the first class for years. Still, from a paper point of view it's wasteful. This has been a public Postal Service announcement.
Here in backwoods Florida it all goes together into the cans and then to the local landfill. Nothing is wasted, because it raises the ground level to allow housing units for retirees to be built above the hurricane surge level.
Ted
Greetings to whatever is left of Occupy Portland from the tiny bit of what's left of Occupy Saskatoon.
Garbage isn't a "big thing" when the temperature hits 0°F. It can wait until the world thaws. Finding homes for the homeless who have adopted us is a "big thing." And we're finding "the system," which is supposed to be helpful, isn't as helpful as it seems (pretends?) to be.
This Bear should be hibernating now, but is just too busy. Bears (including Pootie) know how to survive in the cold; Humans freeze in the cold.
That's today's "life lesson" from Canada.
Here in Oslo (Norway) we sort foodwaste and plastics in to 2 separate colored bags and place them in our garbage cans. There are colletion points for cans and bottles around the city. The remainder of trash goes in a plastic bag. I have found that I have very little other garbage. Trash is burned as fuel in the local heating plant. Sorting and recycling works!
Welcome, Astri, and say hello to any Skaris you see over there, because we're probably related. Speaking of forebears, Rob, Pootie is pretty particular about his creature comforts. Then again, he's not a bear. He's a dog.
Oh my. Thanks for stopping by my little nature blog. It's been awhile and I absolutely love your wonderful sense of humor and irony. I do believe we have the same view of contemporary political life. I just tend to get mad and mostly keep quiet about it. You have a wonderfully sharp knife and know right where to put it. Thanks!
Our multicolored bins are not so full as they used to be. We recycle most food to our geriatric potbellied pig, except for the carbs which we put on the deck railing for the crows.
The garden waste goes into a compost bin for future use.
The emptier the bins, the better, to our way of thinking.
We are in a small midwestern town. Our garbage is picked up every week, every other week a separate recycling bin is collected; it no longer needs to be separated. When we have large groups of holiday guests, it looks as though we have a house of ill repute, with empty beer cans, liquor and wine bottles, newspapers, magazines, cardboard boxes. I almost feel guilty recycling, thinking that I should spread the largesse out over several weeks. Is there such a thing as recycling TOO much?
Wow, for the first time I didn't laugh at all. I realize that sarcasm just sounds normal to me. But I agree with everything you say. Excuse me, I have to stir my compost pail.
Yeah, it's not all that funny. I'll fix that the next time though, don't you worry.
I'll bet you wouldn't believe I've already written six comments to this post but you haven't seen any of them. To be honest, it was only four. I had to discover that I can not post comments to your blog from Firefox. It has to be through a different browser. This is a test of I.E. I think Safari will talk to your blog.
As to recycling, we are lucky that they collect everything in one container, weigh it and credit our account to Recycle Bank. We can get points and trade them for coupons to many merchants–restaurants, stores, etc. Love this system.
Oh, R.J., I'd believe anything. For instance, my "share" button works for me only randomly. Sometimes it just sits there all sullen. Other times it pops up and wants to play. I blame its mother. In fact, my entire method of dealing with computers, which otherwise would make me feel stupid and depressed, is to figure out something to blame that is not me. Menopause worked for a long time, and Republicans always works, but I like to shake it up a little. I have no way of knowing if the "share" button works for anyone else.
So they PAY you for your garbage? What crazy socialist outpost do you live in?
Good God.
I'd have to just slit my throat and which freaking bin would THAT go in???
seriously, we just opened a recycling center in my little town so we no longer have to drive 25 miles to recycle our stuff. It's like heaven. And now you don't have to sort anything. That just doesn't seem right. Maybe it's part of putting Amerika back to work./
I have a trio of composting bins in my backyard, all tacky old handmade things made of wood pallets we re-purposed. (I hate people who say "re-purposed".) But I live out in the country, so there are no rules out here AND the garbage service refuses to pick up our recycling, even though they are required to pick up the townies stuff.
Go figure.
You've done it again Murr. Thanks.
I've got compost in the back yard too, so I'm conflicted. Now I can put meat, actual meat, in my kitchen bin, so I have to think about what's in there before I put it in my own compost, or worse, sort the bad bits out into the yard debris and the rest in compost. On the other hand, if my worst problem is having to keep track of extra meat on my plate, I don't have any problems.
Recycling is still a bit in its infancy here in Spain, changes a lot from one town to the next… but we're getting there! And yeah, it's definitely kids pressuring the parents to do it right ;o)
Tanya and I have one bag of garbage per week and our neighbours half a bag. IF we could recycle paper and cardboard and empty plastic or glass bottles we would have so little garbage it wouldn't fill a grocery bag. Tanya won't compost though we certainly could. she says it attracts rats.