GARBAGE 101

While I was still living in ‘The City’ (really just a town), ‘It’ brought in The Green Bin program.  Great.  More shit to remember. 

When I moved into my first house (The Town Above) after apartment living for eleven years, I was required to sort my garbage, using ‘The Blue Box Rules’.  Paper in one box and pretty well everything else in the other.  Oh, and remember to rinse the containers!  Hmm, my time and hot water – what in the heck am I paying taxes for? 

Then I moved one town north and found that the Blue Box stuff didn’t have to be sorted at all.  Oh goody, I thought, but continued to do it anyway, since I was already so well trained.  ‘Sides, the paper stuff in one box made sense, since it was mostly flat.  Almost everything else went into the ‘other’ Blue Box – styrofoam, rigid plastic packaging, egg cartons, even empty paint cans and motor oil containers.  

Then ‘They’ brought in The Green Bin.  I was not impressed and thought, “Poop on them.  I’ll just put everything in the garbage.”  It’ll be collected every week, anyway.  Wrong.  From now on, regular garbage would only be collected every TWO weeks.  Poop on me.  I could just imagine how nice my kitchen garbage would smell, after amassing it for two weeks, especially in hot summer weather.  I also knew that the assorted neighbourhood wildlife would find it especially tasty and bowed to the inevitable. Sooooo, more sorting.  Soon, I think, this’ll be a full-time job.  When will I have time to go to my ‘real’ job, you know, the one that actually pays me to work? 

I found it easier to determine what went in The Green Bin, once I figured out that organic means pretty well anything that comes out/off of you, the diaper-clad baby, leftovers (usually green anyway), and which have been taking up ‘fridge space, bacon grease (now that was tricky), and even the hair off my head and the dog’s.  The days settled into garbage regularity.

Then I moved to SCA.  What a garbage culture shock.  Back to two Blue Boxes, one for paper (fibre) and the other for what can’t go into the first.  It’s a good thing I’m not employed outside the home at the moment.  I have to go back to garbage sorting school to get things into the right Blue Box, because, according to a very sticky sticker I got in my unemptied Blue Box, which I now have to schlep back to its resting place at the rear of the house, I’m not doing ‘it’ right.  Big SIGH.  Apparently, I’ve flunked the Garbage 101 final.

I set The Blue Box down outside the patio door and peel the sticky sticker off my wrist, which is where it got stuck, as I was schlepping.   Reading the sticker, it states “We left some items behind today, as they are NON-RECYCLABLE:  and it goes on to list 12 different items.  I peer into the blue box, trying to determine where I went wrong.  Hmmm, I think, there’s a small piece of styrofoam.  Could that be it?  How could it be?  A few weeks ago, I had a HUGE amount of styrofoam taken.  Now, I’m really confused.  So, I called The Town and spoke to a very proper woman, with a great British accent.  We commiserate on the lack of Green Binning in SCA and how different I find it - that my used tissues, paper towels, nail clippings, phlegm, kitchen scraps and hair balls horked up by the cats, are no longer able to go to a natural death via a compostable landfill and may forever have to live in a dump. 

Back to the patio door I go and the British lady and I go over each item in the box and pinpoint the probable perpetrators – an egg carton, which should have gone into the paper fibre Blue Box and the small piece of styrofoam, which should have gone into regular garbage.  I mention that a rather large quantity of styrofoam had been taken previously and was informed that it had probably been a new employee who didn’t know any better.  From what she said, it sounds like he mighta got his toches kicked when he got to the dump with a banned substance.

Then I pointed out that the sticker states that ‘some items were left behind’ and mention that ALL the items in that box had been left behind.  The British woman advises me that ‘they’ don’t sort through the box - they leave everything.  “Why, then, does the sticker say ‘some’?”  There was no answer for that one.

After reviewing the remainder of the items in The Blue Box, the helpful woman lets me know that it sounds like I’ve got it the rest of it right and passes me with flying colours.  I get a gold star on the Simcoe Waste Management 2012 Calendar.  Whew!  I know I’ll sleep better tonight.