Dump Run

I took out the trash this morning, cramming the piles of plastic wrappers down so that all our waste could fit in a fifty gallon trash can. Was this two weeks, or three? I couldn’t remember. I would like to think of myself and my housemates as fairly eco-conscious at least in comparison to some of our neighbors, but at least once a month, I haul a truckbed’s worth of garbage to the town transfer station. There it is collected with everyone else’s refuse and trucked up to Missoula to be piled on a literal mountain of garbage. 

The garbage in my truck consists solely of food wrappers with the occasional packaging from a replacement tool. Everything comes in a wrapper these days, from our eco-friendly organic tea bags to our carrots and celery. We bubble fizzy water in reusable containers and drink milk from cardboard boxes rather than plastic jugs. We compost all of our organic waste and recycle all of our metal cans, and yet we still create a truck bed's worth of garbage every month. We don’t buy things we don’t need, but then again, where is the line between need and greed? 

We need food and clothing, therefore we buy what is available. When I wear out the Merrells that I found at the thrift store in June, they still end up in the landfill with a few hundred extra miles on them. They just took an extra eight months to get there. Same goes for my Carhartt jacket and Wrangler jeans that I always try to buy second hand but sometimes can’t find. In ten months, I will have worn these ones out and need another. That’s just life.

Not a single item of furniture in our house was bought new. Our eighty year old cast iron sink was found in the woods of Vermont. Our fridge came from a renovation. Our couch from a friend who was moving. But then again, those hand-me-downs came about because I found these things just before they were thrown out. It was my house or the dump for most items in our house. Heck, a majority of the house was built of the parts and pieces of three old houses I tore down and recycled because they were going to be bulldozed by the owners.

As I work, I watch the FedEx and UPS trucks circle town constantly, depositing more products on people’s doorstep every day. On a rare trip to town to fetch an item that I cannot live without, I drive past the cathedrals of consumerism, the sacred box stores, and see millions of plastic items with a five year shelf life, soon to be discarded for the newer model or newest fashion. I hope for the best, imagining these items to be necessary to get someone through a difficult part of life, but reality sets in when I see the worn but still useful replaced products sitting on my neighbor’s curb or lying in the dumpster.

I live by the creed that I can make the world a better place by setting a good example. I salvage all I can from these street corner giveaways, never throw away leftovers, make do with old and beaten up products and only buy quality replacements when unable to fix the old ones. And yet, for every item I save, I see hundreds or thousands more discarded. As I spend hours and days of my life rescuing random things from the cycle of waste, I think hard about this issue. 

Where is the line between need and greed? When does enough become too much? How do you tell someone that they are a greedy pig? How do you tell a whole society that they are being wasteful for no good reason besides having become accustomed to it? What gives anyone the right to decide where any of these lines reside? Do I have the right to say something? Do I have a duty to do something? How much can I do? And honestly, how can I cast stones upon my neighbors when I find myself hauling a truckload of trash to the dump today?