Andy Young
The town garbagemen are going to be surprised next Tuesday when they make their weekly drive down our street and see a tightly-packed green trash bag at the end of my driveway……for the first time since late December.
I’m off to a promising start in 2019 regarding household waste disposal. It took four officially embossed town trash bags to contain all the rubbish my children and I produced last year, which was downright embarrassing. That was a 33 percent increase over the trio of bags we sent to the local landfill, or to wherever it is Cumberland’s household trash goes, in 2017.
I consider myself an environmentalist, even though I haven’t participated in a protest march, boycotted the oil companies, or spray-painted anyone’s fur coat lately. My ongoing but still evolving contributions to the tenuous health of the only planet currently suitable for human habitation include lessening personal consumption of non-renewable resources and voting for aspiring public servants who acknowledge not only that climate change is real, but that human behavior plays a significant role in it.
Limiting trash bag use isn’t that tough. We don’t eat a lot of meat in my house, and when we do it’s always boneless. My compost heap is chock full of banana peels, onion skins, apple cores, orange peels, eggshells, potato skins, pepper hulls, and carrot shavings, but nothing flesh-based that attracts any unwelcome vermin. (I’m not sure if sprinkling the pile’s border with cayenne pepper has anything to do with the absence of raccoons, skunks, and similar wildlife, but I’m going to keep applying it, just in case.)
Every month or so I send out a bin of carefully-separated paper, cardboard, plastic, and glass items, all of which I trust the town will reuse or dispose of as responsibly as possible. Between that and composting, there really isn’t much left to deep-six. Frozen food bags, cereal box liners, tissues, dryer lint, spent toothpaste tubes, and floor sweepings (which go to the compost once it thaws) are just about it. Every week or so I’ll change the kitchen trash, tossing it into the big plastic sack that’ll eventually get hauled away. I can get quite a lot of refuse into those bags using my special compacter, which hyper-observant types would recognize as a size 14 sneaker with my foot in it.
Some people (okay; people who know me really well) suggest my trash bag consumption rate is less related to environmental concerns than it is to fiscal ones, and I’ll admit: economics does play a role. But at last look those 33-gallon green plastic sacks with the Town of Cumberland seal embossed on them were retailing at $25 for a package of 10, and after 2018’s bag-squandering fiasco, it didn’t take long to figure out that frittering away trash bags at the rate of four per 12 months would require purchasing two ten-packs every five years. To me $50 per half-decade seems exorbitant, so as I see it, using those bags efficiently is good for both the environment and my often too-slender wallet. It’s a win-win!
Of course, there’s more responsible citizens can do to help boost the earth’s health, and I could be considered something of a hypocrite on that score, since my daily round-trip commute to my place of employment is 75 miles. Working closer to home or moving nearer to work isn’t feasible; my children and their many friends attend terrific schools where we live, and I teach in a different community, one full of wonderful people who make me feel both valued and appreciated. That said, I do car pool regularly, generally drive at speeds recommended for peak fuel efficiency, and do so in a vehicle that gets over 45 miles per gallon of gas. To lessen my carbon footprint even more I grocery shop with cloth bags, and during the summer do so on a bicycle, rather than in a car.
I’ve good-naturedly chided some young folks who profess to be environmental activists, yet drive to school (and sometimes from absurdly short distances) rather than ride taxpayer-funded school buses that go right through their neighborhoods each morning. One particularly strident young fellow, perhaps fed up with being reminded of the incongruousness of his stated love of the Green New Deal and the daily half-mile drive he makes to and from school, finally told me, “All that stuff you do doesn’t make any difference! No one person can make the earth healthy again all by himself!’
Of course, he’s right. My efforts probably aren’t doing the planet a huge amount of good.
But they’re definitely not doing it any harm.
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