Listen up, Earth citizens. You will generate 25 percent more trash between today and Dec. 25th than you do all the other months of the year. You will haul it weekly to your curb and it will disappear. Catalogs, boxes, mailings, ribbons, wrapping paper, holiday cards, glass and plastic, gone, our detritus whisked away. There will even be live trees at the curb (sob) waiting for incineration.
There is nothing magical about what happens to the trash after it leaves your neighborhood. It goes from the curb into one of Portsmouth's 12-ton capacity garbage trucks and up the highway to a big garbage pile (aka landfill) in Rochester. There, Portsmouth's 12.5 million annual pounds of garbage join recycling and trash from surrounding communities for sorting.
We're talking trash this week, folks. Today, we lie on the floor and bemoan our overlarge appetites and give thanks for our privileged citizenship in the world's premiere military industrial complex. Tomorrow, watch out, we hit the stores.
I kicked off my holiday season by attending a trash lecture a few weeks ago hosted by municipal employee Silke Psula (known to her Portsmouth colleagues as the recycling queen) and others from nearby communities. (Please don't feel left out if you are from Dover, or Eliot or Greenland. Call your municipal people Monday for your numbers.)
Trash, says Psula, needs to become sexy. She quickly follows that comment with reference to a biblical verse about stewardship to the earth. I don't know about you, but I have never successfully mixed sexy with stewardship. Sure, stewardship involves passion, but it's not necessarily the sexy kind.
Anyway, the harbinger of the holidays has been showing up in my mailbox for some weeks now. I don't even look at the catalogs, much less save them. I put them into the paper recycling box in the kitchen and haul them out to the curb when Tuesday comes.
But I think. I think. I think about garbage and food and resources.
I began to eat local this summer, bit by bit. I attended the farmers market every week, got to know the angry farmers and the friendly farmers, figured out how some got their greens so clean (old washing machine agitation cycle), and bought fresh meat for the first time in my life (sorry Bessie). Eating with a local purpose led naturally to wondering about trash.
I have recycled since 1986, when I moved to California and got to know Greg. He ran one of San Francisco's early recycling centers, and educated the community tirelessly (if grumpily) on the necessity of recycling. I thought it was cute, quaint and quirky.
I was young.
Now I am old and I worry. I worry about the burden our biological need to procreate places upon the earth. I worry that the leaves did not seem to fall this year until about three weeks after I thought they should. I worry that about the startling reduction in the size of the polar ice cap as photographed from space. I don't need science to point the way, and I don't need politics to equivocate.
There is succor in the data, however. The average bag of trash is 20 lbs., before categorical recycling. We can reduce that to just 4 lbs. by separating materials. And yes, it is important to separate the plastic 1's and 2's from the other numbers.
The 1's and 2's literally boil down to a different substance than the others. Because there is an aftermarket ready to purchase them, they can't be contaminated by other types of plastics. They get purchased, turned into a raw resource, sold to someone who creates a product and eventually your trash is marketed back to you in the form of a recycled product.
Sorting is not just a feel-good green act. The consequences of poor sorting are almost as dire as the consequences of not sorting at all. New Hampshire is not siting new landfill beyond 2018. By 2020, we will have no further capacity for old-fashioned dump-it-in-big-piles-somewhere-out-of-town-where-I-don't-have-to-think-about-it style landfills. We must reduce the scope of our throwaways, and become more creative in our day to day living. It's a crowded planet. We've had the indulgent luxury of a new cup every day for our coffee, of disposable diapers, of commercial cleaning products.
It's time to get back to vinegar and lemon juice to clean the bathroom, to drink our own perfectly good tap water, to support projects like the UNH Ecoline and to purchase responsible technologies as they become more widely available to us.
Regardless of our politics, we're all in this together.
Suzanne is out of town and cannot attend any musical festivities at our local red retailer tomorrow. She is available for bail bond duty, however, at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.
