Weekly Garbage Haul
by Mr.e

We used to put out a lot of garbage every week. More than we should have been allowed to. I kept reading the signage on the side of the garbage trucks that said something about a three-bag limit, but chose not to respond to this advice from the powers that be at municipal hall.

I compared the number of bags I was lugging to the curb every week and the suggested number of bags per household and scoffed. Whatever! Heck, our house looked big enough to fool the sanitation engineers into thinking that two families shared the space and that all that garbage couldn’t come from a small family at all.

Reducing our trash output didn’t have the immediate urgency that an official ultimatum would have lent the situation. I’ve heard of some cities that charge (per bag/can) for garbage collection. Reducing our waste seemed like a daunting task.
Not without a little guilt and some envy I noticed that the house across the street consistently put out less trash than we did. I knew there were more people in the household, but how the heck did they do it? Surely they didn’t consume less.

Well, after all was said and done, some simple recycling practices made the difference. We began by not including any organic food waste in our curbside trash, throwing that into the compost bin out back. Then we made sure that the cardboard, newsprint, flyers, glass and cans were separated and found their way into the recycling box.

In this day and age of increased environmental awareness the onus is entirely on us to do what we can to reduce the amount of household waste we put into the landfills – which are increasingly hard pressed to keep up with our snowballing consumer culture.

I must admit that even though we are separating materials that can be recycled from our garbage, we are not reusing as much as we should be. And that is where the solution to reducing our waste lies: reuse versus one time use.

In the three years since this municipality implemented the three bag limit and made it’s citizens aware of what they are putting out every week, the amount of garbage trucked off to the landfill has dropped by an impressive 40%. And that is the result of a small adjustment in attitude. If we continue to respond to our environmental awareness then that number will drop further and the load carried to the curb on garbage day will diminish.

Why, just this morning my garbage can was only 2/3 full when I walked it to the curb and my back likes the lighter load too.
…Then there is the actual recycling industry question. But that’s a different can of squirmy worms altogether.