Leaky Buckets

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