Trash

My neighborhood cleaned up their trash pile

What do you do about your trash?

Did that question make you pause for a minute? Is trash something that you think about on a regular basis? Or maybe you pride yourself for recycling? Or compost-- what a great option!

But some places the "options" are a little more complicated. I've probably complained about the trash-covered beaches here in the past, but maybe the real problem has been less than clear.

See, we have no landfill here. Between the steep mountains and private property, they've never found a good location for a landfill.

We also have a fairly large amount of imported goods. And since buying in bulk requires having a larger amount of money at a time, many people buy in single-serving packages that that average 30 cents apiece. And you can imagine the plastic and metal involved in the packaging for all of that.

Then there's the organic waste. Some of it, goats and chickens will eat. But not everyone has goats or chickens, so what will they do with the vegetable and fruit scraps that come from daily cooking?

And what about wrecked cars? car parts? motorcycle parts? demolished buildings? the list goes on.

So the common solution to the trash problem is to take trash to a river or beach, oftentimes packaged in a plastic bag. The rivers eventually float the trash to the ocean and the ocean eventually moves the trash off the shoreline.

As someone who cares about clean beaches, I find it hard to contribute to the collection of trash on the beach. So my housemate and I burn what we can, feed leftover food scraps to our cat, and compost what we can. We give plastic bottles to the shop next door for bottling their hot pepper sauce and juice to sell. But what do you do about aerosol bottles and other non-aluminum metals?

And we realize that most of the society here doesn't place that high of a priority on protecting the environment. The general attitude is "well, what option do we have?" 

Do you ever feel blessed to have a landfill?