Your Trash Just Doesn’t Disappear, Stupid! (Or How to Make Sure Useful Things Stay out of Landfills)
Please forgive my rudeness. If I heard my children speak to someone that way, there’d be some serious lecturing going on. But you’ll understand when I relay the conversation I heard between two young moms the other day at a restaurant.
Mom #1 “My garage was so jam packed with boxes of things. I didn’t even know what was in half of them. I finally go so tired of it all I just took them all out to the curb.”
Mom #2 “Isn’t it such a great feeling when the trash men just make it all disappear?”
Mom#1 “Yes, ‘poof’ and it’s all gone.”
To which I wanted to scream over to their table “Your trash just doesn’t disappear, stupid!” But I didn’t because I was raised better than that. And my son was with me. And I’m fairly gutless in situations like that. But I was screaming it in my head.
What an absolute waste. What still perfectly useful items were in those boxes that the trash men hauled away to be burried in a landfill. There’s no way of knowing, but I do know this one thing. There were many ways she could have easily found new homes for the still useful things in those boxes.
As I see it, when you’ve got something that is still useful but you aren’t using it anymore, there are three responsible ways to get rid of it. None of them involve putting it out at the curb for the fairy trash men to waive their wands and make it disappear.
