Monday, August 19, 2013

What Does Our Garbage Tell Others About How We Live?

With the advent of recycling, our garbage has changed a bit, and...let's face it, most of us don't really want to spend our time thinking about something as icky as garbage. But we've learned a lot about past civilizations by studying their garbage. Find out more in Minute Earth's Garbage Doesn't Lie.

2 comments:

Laney4 said...

Our city has had a wonderful recycling program for decades. Last month they introduced a "compost" container so we can divert our wet foods/dirty papers from landfill as well; we tried it but I've reverted back to our garbage disposal for vegetable peelings, etc., and only use the compost bin for meat bones and dirty napkins, etc. Much less smell and bees swarming, as I'm able to keep the few bones in our house until the night before compost pickup.
Years ago I added up that we had one big green bag of garbage once every 6-11 weeks; now that we are all adults and I'm trying to downsize, many items go in our yard-sale or donation piles, but some items hit the garbage, so we now have one bag every 6-8 weeks. Still much better than most neighbours, mind you....
What irks me most is that most apartment dwellers throw EVERYTHING down their garbage chute because it's easy and free. I wish they would recycle....

Myrna Mackenzie said...

Elaine, I love that compost idea! We have a pretty generous recycling program and can recycle a lot of plastics that other communities still don't take (although it's not as generous as it used to be. Up until a year or so ago, I could recycle styrofoam, but our village switched companies and we can't do that anymore. I don't use a lot of styrofoam, but meat in the grocery store is still sold on those styrofoam trays).

You're doing exceptionally well if you can have one bag of garbage every 6-11 weeks!