Saturday, May 31, 2008

Garbage



Hinds County Gazette

Christiansen's Comments

HCG May 29 2008
Over the years I have become somewhat, I don’t know, ashamed, isn’t quite the word I am looking for, self-conscious, might be better a bit better word, about my garbage, trash, rubbish what ever you want to call it. I just have so blooming much of it.

I feel bad about our over capacity land fills…I just hate adding to the dilemma…but I can’t help it…. everything you buy has at least three times more packaging then necessary to contain the article. I suspect the reason the packing is so expansive is so, they have more room to tell us how tasty, healthy, safe, or useful their item is…they don’t use it to give us coherent directions on how to use the apparatus that’s for sure.

Does it seem to you that the more environmentally aware we become the worse the problem gets? This is how trash was handled in Palisade Nebraska when I was growing up. First of all I don’t remember there being that much of it, there was no paper towels, plastic bags, no cling wrap…might have had been some foil, but mostly I remember waxed paper…. milk came in glass bottles when empty they were set out on the porch and fresh milk in sparking clean bottles were left in their place….water was not bought in bottles, it was fine out of the tap….Soft drinks did not come in cans but returnable bottles. Flour came in cloth bags, the cloth bags were then made in to tea towels….Grease, lard, came in metal buckets, they were reused for storage, lunch buckets, sand pails etc…Even egg shells and coffee grounds were not thrown in the trash They were placed around mother’s flowers.

Cardboard boxes, I do not recall many of those ether…when the groceries were delivered they often were in a cardboard box…If they were clean and big enough mother stored blankets and winter clothes in them. If they were real big boxes we kids went to the car bridge flatten them out, sat down on them and slide down the concrete embankment,

Food was not often dumped because of spoilage or just too much of it…something ate it. If we didn’t, the dog did…I think there might have been commercial dog food, but I as I remember our dog ate mostly table scraps….And stale bread was pitched out the back door for the birds.

There was a garbage can in the kitchen, it was neatly lined with newspaper or a big brown paper bag from the grocery store was sat down in it….no plastic bag that ties neatly…just the paper. But when it became full it was carried to the alley and placed in a 50 gallon barrel and when the barrel was full it was incinerated.
You all, I don’t even remember taking out the trash as a daily chore.

Now, if you had things that were to just big to burn in the trash barrel, old broken furniture all such as that…you took it to the city dump and pushed it out….while you were there of course, you poked around in the piles of other peoples cast offs…sort of an early form of dumpster diving….people throw away some pretty neat things….we did not call it that back then but when we took a "Find" home it was “recycling”.

There was an odor at our town dump….it was mildly disagreeable…But not bad enough to cause you to commence gagging. But that was before disposable diapers…back in the days baby dodo was flushed. About the worse I ever smelled was chicken guts and feathers and they didn’t smell all that bad until they were burnt. That’s what happened when the dump got full they burned the garbage and what did not burn they buried….and it started all over again.

Trash day when I drive down the streets of Edwards, I rarely see a pile bigger then mine except after Christmas. I have had so much trash I was too embarrassed to put it all out in one week…caught my self just putting out half…That does not work, I had three as much the next week.

I know you have all seen this, one little plastic shopping bag, handles tied in a knot, placed at the end of a drive way. …That is a week’s trash! How do they do that?

I said all of that, to say this…for years I have had a garbage goal. That being, for me to confine a week’s trash in one garbage can, and have it neatly topped with its lid.


Last week, I achieved that goal!!!!! Yeah!!!! So now I can hold my head high and look even the most hard core environmentalist in the eye.


I know you are just thrilled I shared my garbage with all of you.
Call if you need me.
About the picture..it is of this weeks garbage..I did not take a picture of last week's garbage ...the one where I was able to place the lid on the can... as you can see, I was unable to repeat last week's garbage success...but honestly this is not bad for me...I usually have much more.

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