Reflections on the Fifth Week of Fall – Garbage Deliberations

 

    After forty-eight years and five months of marriage, Spence and I sat in the great room to solve a new problem. Garbage.

    Tuesday the sale of our old house closed and ended Spence's routine of hauling garbage and recycling to the Cleveland Heights tree lawn.

    In rural communities, taxes don't include garbage removal. We had researched landfills within forty miles. None accepted occasional loads of garbage. For prices neighbors complained were exorbitant, landfills gave us two choices. First, buy pickup service which Spence vetoed because of their twice-the-speed-limit reckless driving and their habit of leaving animal-ripped messes on the berm. Second, rent a dumpster which made no sense since we only had a plastic grocery bag of garbage a week.

    Staring at Spence staring at me across the coffee table, I said, “We need to check what we can recycle.”

    He fetched the empty container bag, I grabbed the paper recycling, and the truck bounced us to Cochranton. In the high school parking lot, we studied the labels on recycle bins large enough to hold an ATV. Spence whipped out his note pad and wrote: Bottles, jugs, jars, cans, aluminum, tin, steel, and #1 & 2 plastics. Newspaper, magazines, and corrugated cardboard.

    I gently set glass bottles and rinsed food cans inside a bin. All the glossy junk mail and cardboard seltzer water cartons rode home with us.

    “Burnables,” Spence said.

    Our township allowed burning. After researching on line, I chose BurnRight's large, stainless steel, hi-temp burn barrel,  the most eco-friendly available. Off and on during the week Spence assembled the barrel and mumbled about inadequate directions. We'd burn the paper Cleveland Heights would have recycled.

    That left non-recyclable plastics and Styrofoam. Since the butcher shop closed in Sandy Lake, we'd bought meat at Giant Eagle in Meadville. Cuts came wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic–not paper.

    “Change to Malady's Meat Market?” I asked.

    Spence shook his head. “Their meat is pricey and just average. Maybe there's a meat market in Erie.”

    A two hour round trip to buy meat in paper wrappings? Not my first choice. “Does Giant Eagle recycle Styrofoam like Heinen's in Cleveland?”

    “No, and Heinen's stopped recycling,” he said. “I suspect no one takes Styrofoam anymore.”

“Giant Eagle has a garbage can outside. Why don't we take the meat trays back to them?”

    Basics decided, we reorganized garbage into seven containers.

1) compost

2) scrap paper fire starters

3) aluminum recycling

4) glass, metal, and plastic #1 and #2 recycling

5) newspaper, magazines, and corrugated cardboard recycling

6) glossy junk mail and food carton burnables

7) garbage

    The rest of the week, with a Styrofoam tray or an empty tooth paste tube in my hand, I'd open the old garbage container which now held burnables. Sigh. Besides the hide-and-seek-game of finding the right bin out of seven, using the new system generated questions. Are floor sweepings compost? I pulled out a sliver of plastic and emptied the dust into the compost bin. Are food scraps burnable? Duh. I'd burnt plenty meals. I dried the scraps and dumped them into burnables.

    I asked Spence harder questions. “What do I do with toe nail clippings?”

    “Compost, burnables, or garbage,” he said. “Only they'll take a long time to compost.

    One question I didn't have to ask. When quests say, “What can I bring,” I'll answer, “Nothing, but there is something you can take.”