My neighbors are having a contest to see how many dead vehicles, mattresses, and tube TVs they can stack inside a 50×100-ft. city lot. The winner – so far – is up to 7, 7, and 4. The ultimate winner won’t be known for some time since the contest has no apparent end date; given the contest’s long history it could be a while.
Once upon a time, I would have objected to such a contest, but having lived in Arkansas for decades now, I’m acculturated to this particular aspect and vestige of Southern Heritage, and to the robustly competitive spirit of our many citizens of Celtic ancestry. Unlike my own dour and depressive close-with-a-dollar Norwegian and German forbearers, these descendants of Appalachian mountaineers can be relied on to cheerfully, if relentlessly, accumulate hills, mountains, and entire ranges of spent treasure. Throw in a busted-up bass boat and an exhausted trampoline and you’ve got a scene from Winter’s Bone right down the street.
My objection – excuse me, prior objection – is/was, I now understand, purely aesthetic. The only difference between junk and litter hoarding neighbors and obsessive-compulsive neatnik me – and you – is that we pay guys to haul our crap away. We can afford to hide our garbage, our half-used and discarded belongings, and the detritus of our addictive consumerism in someone else’s backyard. These backyards are landfills. Latte drinkers in NY City send trainloads of their excess consumption to backyards in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
Estimates of when we’ll run out of landfill space vary from “never” to 2037. The “never” folks point to Arkansas and estimate the Natural State has ample room for 660 years of trash hauled up from Dallas. So, no worries.
There is broad agreement, however, that we can’t and don’t come close to recycling what we put into recycling bins. An optimistic estimate is that 1.4 out of 5 pounds gets recycled into something useful. The rest goes into a landfill – including that peanut butter jar you didn’t thoroughly wash before “recycling.”
There’s still time to give something up for Lent – and for maybe a bit longer. How about single-use plastics?
I empathize with your plight. When I moved to eureka in 2007 I bought a 4 plex sight unseen. Had just driven by it.
Needless to say everything for 100 years was thrown down the hill from the balconies, mattresses, kitchen sinks ,couches, garbage. It took me two spring, falls and winters to haul all that stuff out of there. As far as me I buy used, worn, second hand and antiques which I sell all in antique booth when wanting to declutter….water machine, little plastic, recycle all I can. Keep jars for storing everything. I think if most did as we did we definitely would not have the issues we have…great article makes me want to be better person
Good column and humorous, as always. Thanks, Dan. Amen to giving up single use plastics or eating at places that use them…..or styrofoam. And let’s go one further to getting governments to outlaw them, like NYC.