As I learned from living
there during four years of college, California is a land of extremes. The all-time U. S. record high temperature of
134 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded in Death Valley, which has the lowest land
elevation in the U. S. too, and this principle extends to human behavior as
well. A recent post on the San Jose Mercury-News website tells the
story of Anne-Marie Bonneau, whose teenage daughter read about floating islands
of plastic trash in the oceans back in 2011.
Just as monks and nuns of old took vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience, Ms. Bonneau took a vow then and there to never buy another piece of
plastic again.
She’s still living up to her
vow, and has extended the notion of cutting back waste to the extent that she
has to take out the garbage only once a year, in a shopping bag (paper, not
plastic, no doubt). Not everybody would
care to go to the extremes that Ms. Bonneau does. She collects glass jars to store liquids in,
buys shampoo in bulk, and makes her own deodorant and granola. Her daughter Charlotte, while she is still on
board with the zero-waste idea most of the time, has committed acts of
rebellion from time to time, such as buying a plastic water bottle. And she threatened to leave home if her
mother switched from toilet paper to rewashable cloths, so they still buy
toilet paper (but not in plastic bags).
Bonneau, whose day job as an editor must leave her with enough energy to
run a part-time two-person recycling company and manufacturing firm, admits she
is “hard-core.” But she evidently feels
strongly enough about how the planet’s oceans are getting trashed with an
estimated 19 billion pounds of plastic every year that it gives her the energy
and motivation to do what she and her daughter do along these lines.
Ms. Bonneau is not alone,
though few go almost to the limit of zero waste as she has. Recycling in some
form happens in most large cities in the U. S. and smaller towns are catching
up too. While we sometimes think of it
as a new idea, nature has been recycling since the beginning of life, at least. Organic material comes from the soil into
plants, animals eat the plants, and both during and after the animal’s life,
the material returns to the soil. And
there is a line of thought out there that seems to say if we would only get rid
of all this Industrial Revolution stuff—fossil fuels and plastic and
climate-change-causing combustion—and live like people did prior to, say, 1500
A. D., then we’d have a sustainable economy and ecosystem.
The trouble is, there would
be a lot fewer of us to enjoy it. Before
Europeans came along, the North American continent supported fewer than a
million residents. And if you think
making your own deodorant is hard, try catching enough fish and wildlife every
day to live on. Any archaeologist knows
that the most informative thing you can discover about an ancient settlement is
its trash heap. And from trash heaps, we
know that even ancient civilizations were pretty wasteful and generated a fair
amount of trash. I don’t know of any numerical
comparisons, but my point is that just getting rid of plastic packaging would
not automatically solve all our trash problems, though it would help.
Under the present
circumstances that prevail in most parts of the U. S., there is not much
motivation for those who do not have the exquisitely sensitive global-political
conscience of Ms. Bonneau to reduce one’s weekly trash production. To speak personally, my city provides us with
three (plastic, sorry) trash barrels, each capable of holding a couple of cubic
yards of stuff. One is for green waste
that presumably goes to a compost pile somewhere, another is for specific types
of recyclable materials (plastic, glass, aluminum), and the third is for any
general trash that can’t go into the first two.
For what it’s worth, our contribution to the recycle bin is usually
larger than our contribution to the trash bin, and I’ve often felt kind
of silly tossing one small bag of trash into that great big bin each week. I suppose I should have felt guilty for using
it that much.
Here’s an idea which probably won’t be very popular, because
it would cost people money. But I’ll
float it anyway. The technology exists
for trash-pickup trucks to register the net weight of everybody’s trash as they
stop and lift it with those big fork kind of things into the truck. What if you were charged by the pound for
your trash? And what if it was a pretty
steep charge after a first flat rate?
That would get a lot of attention from people who currently don’t give a
flip about how much stuff they throw out.
It has the advantage of letting folks who value plastic above money to
keep doing what they’re doing, but it would re-train the rest of us to buy
stuff that leaves less trash behind.
A brief Internet search turned up a single instance where
this idea has been tried: in 1993, in
California, naturally. A trash-pickup
firm serving Thousand Oaks and Ventura experimented with a prototype system
from a North Carolina firm. But on the
day a reporter came to witness the first public trial, the system got weights
wrong by three to six pounds and missed one trash can entirely. For whatever reason, even though the idea has
been around for more than twenty years, it hasn’t caught on.
So that means if you want to reduce your contribution to the
global trash pile, you are more or less on your own. Ms. Bonneau’s example is out there for anyone
who wishes to try it, but outside of the famously ecologically-minded culture
of the Bay Area, you may be regarded as a little eccentric. For most of us, making small changes in what
and how we buy things will help some. For
example, after I read Jen Hatmaker’s 7
Experiment: Staging Your Own Mutiny
Against Excess, I started reusing the plastic bag I put my lunch sandwich
in, keeping it for a week instead of throwing it away every day and getting a
new one. That’s about as small a change
as you can make and still be able to say you’ve done something, but it’s better
than nothing, I suppose.
