Wednesday night is trash night at the house. The roomies and I grudgingly pile all the big trash bags together into our 90 gallon beige trash can and drag the stupid thing to the curb, avoiding the various spiders, nightcrawlers, cats, and high grass that make up the more interesting obstacles in any traversal of our yard. Every Wednesday night (and the concomitant Thursday morning) I marvel at how other people can fit the flotsam and jetsam of their week, the byproduct of their modern living, into these tiny little 30 gallon green trash cans. Not only that, but, after particularly trashy weeks when we have no choice but to borrow our neighbor’s unused trash can space, when we’ve had to place our bags into their tiny trash cans we notice that they are not even full. Sometimes only half-full at best!
“What is going on here?” I think to myself. “Are we really that much messier? That much more trashier?” One of the roots of this situation comes from having four people living in one house, all generating trash. However, our neighbors appear to have anywhere from three to six people living in their house and they, too, have a 30 gallon green trash can that is, invariably, only three-quarters full.
Ecological arguments about astounding wastefulness aside (we have two recycle bins, full to the brim, every week… beaten only by one curious neighbor who has three on some sort of ingenious shelf system), where does all this trash come from? Is this some symptom of the choices we’ve made in our lives, that we value the disposable more than the lasting and reusable? Or maybe that we value convenience over the necessity of responsibility that comes with living a life of conscientious conservation?
More reasons to despise capitalism. That trash can is heavy, smelly, scares the cats, and made me run through a big, nasty spiderweb. Good night!