I’d like to talk to you about my relationship with garbage. I’m not talking about clutter; I’m talking about pure, unadulterated refuse. Surprisingly, it is not only noteworthy but also has a history that, unbeknownst to me, began in my childhood and took on a life of its own only after I married and had children.
My first inkling of the role garbage was to play in my life began when my oldest child mistakenly thought the garbage can was a toy. Please note: She was not a deprived child in any sense of the word. I have to say I was surprised by her interest in our garbage can. I’m not really sure what attraction there is to a container of smelly, stinky stuff – but who am I to judge? As a new mother, I was also under the false impression that my adorable daughter would actually listen to me when I told her not to knock over the garbage can, eat its most recent contributions, or drop our wedding silver into it. After coming to terms with one of my first myths of parenting, however, I relegated the garbage can to the top of the kitchen counter. Now, this made perfect sense to me, since I was spending an inordinate amount of time picking garbage up off the floor. (I quickly got over the yuck factor here.) My husband came on board with the concept after a brief period of time while I was out and he was left at home to literally pick up the pieces (of garbage).
It wasn’t until my daughter started experiencing garbage-can-peer pressure that it occurred to me that maybe she had outgrown this phase. One afternoon after a play date she asked, “How come all the other mommies keep their garbage cans on the floor?” So I decided to give it a whirl and take it down. First, let me say, it took about a week to get used to this. During this time, my husband and I frantically – and frequently – turned left and right looking for the garbage can, since it no longer occupied its prominent position on the counter. More importantly, however, we had reached a milestone. My daughter no longer played with the garbage. The only painful part of the garbage-off-the counter milestone was when I explained to her why we used to keep it there. She peered up at me with a disgusted look on her face, “Eww, who would do that?”
As the garbage can began to play a less important role in my life, the garbage part of my existence began to increase in leaps and bounds. I have come to believe the reason for this is that we live in the Age of the Prepackaged Snack. As I pondered this premise, it led me down “memory lane” to lunch time in elementary school. First let me state that the lunch I used to take is as obsolete as a floppy disk. Second, let me state that, based on today’s standards, I would have been considered a malnourished child.
This is what I took for lunch every day from first to sixth grade: I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich wrapped in waxed paper (what’s waxed paper?), a whole apple (not cut up and placed in a Ziploc baggie), and on a good day, three Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies that were dropped unceremoniously into the bottom of my brown paper lunch bag. (Note: I did use my Mickey Mouse lunch box until second grade, even after the thermos broke the first day I got it.)
Now, do you see why my lunch is obsolete? First, you’re probably thinking, you call this a lunch?! But once we get past the size of the lunch, surely you agree that this lunch would not, and could not, be found in today’s school lunch rooms. Let’s face it, peanut butter is practically considered a disease, and no kid would know what to do with a whole apple. This is aside from the fact that most kids would think the waxed paper was supposed to be used for a fuse-bead project. I’m not even sure the cookies would make the cut, since Chips Ahoy now makes cookies with extra chips, bigger chips, candy chips – and, the one that puts them all to shame, the “soft” chocolate chip cookie.
The point I really want to bring out is this: Notice how there was practically no garbage involved in my day. I don’t think I even knew what a Ziploc bag was until I was about twenty. You might think I’m trying to promote a “greener” lifestyle here, but before you jump to conclusions, read on. Really, what I’m trying to understand is why I have so many wrappers all over the floor of my car. This takes me back to the premise that we live in a snack-crazed generation.
Now, it might seem as though prepackaged snacks would ultimately make the lives of busy parents and children easier, but it actually leads to what is becoming the bane of my existence: garbage. Let’s analyze snacks. First they come in boxes. This leads to garbage. Second they can be taken anywhere, like into the car. This leads to garbage. Third they can and must be taken on every outing, lest our children get hungry. This leads to garbage. Have I made myself clear? Before you start formulating your argument that I should be recycling all of this, please be honest and realize that recycling is simply a term of art for garbage that has been promoted to the less stinky refuse container in your household. It is, and always will, be garbage to me. In fact, recycling is my current nemesis.
Real recycling first came to my attention after I was married. Prior to this I considered washing my dishes to be a valid form of recycling. How wrong I was. Here is how recycling abruptly made subconscious inroads into my life: After about two years of marriage, my wonderful, generally easygoing mother-in-law, a”h, became one of many New Yorkers who began to experience RRRSD, reduce-reuse-recycle stress disorder. This previously unknown condition was directly related to the new laws pertaining to recycling.
The great city of New York had just relegated garbage to new heights previously unknown to mankind. Garbage became an art. It had to be washed, separated, nurtured, and placed outside on specific days into specially marked containers. Any human error resulting in misplaced garbage was subject to a heavy fine. I remember major discussions about containers that could possibly fit into more than one category. For example, borsht was no longer simply something your children would never eat. It now became a “halachic” matter. Is it a glass jar with a label, or is it a piece of paper with a glass appendage? Getting the wrong psak could cost you $80. I kid you not!
This attention to detail and its imposition on society at large had only one positive outcome: It created jobs. No, really. The fine city of New York hired specialists to dig through the garbage of its citizens. I always wondered how the job description went. I think it must have been something like this: “Needed: Environmentally-aware individuals to excavate self-contained, cylindrical landfills. Requirements: The ability to write and the inability to smell.”
This experience not only gave me one more reason to be grateful to be living in Baltimore (this was before our own City-imposed recycling program) but also created a subconscious set of recycling expectations that would stay dormant for years. It turns out that my overall recycling belief was that, in order to really recycle, you must aggressively divide and conquer your garbage. I became keenly aware of my recycling assumptions when our previously mentioned, government-imposed recycling program was instituted in Baltimore. Baltimore’s philosophy was just-throw-all-your-recyclables-into-one-big-container-and-we’ll-do-the-rest. Now, I, an educated, responsible person who had previous recycling experience, thought to myself, just one minute. Are you telling me that I don’t have to separate the garbage? Are you telling me that the previous generation did and this is a new-fangled way of doing things? Are you telling me that borsht is just borsht? Quite frankly, I wasn’t buying it. I really thought it was a scam to make it look like Baltimore was recycling when they were just throwing all the garbage in one big landfill after letting us run around like idiots trying not to make sure our bright blue plastic bags didn’t get into our bright yellow recycling bins. Really it seemed like a conspiracy.
I have to say, it wasn’t until I went on the TA trip with my son’s third grade class to the waste management plant that I became a believer. It was an eye opener not only into the world of the many different ways of separating garbage, which I won’t go into here, but also actually ended up as a shining moment for me as a mother and recycler (which between you and me, I wasn’t).
Before the tour of the plant, the tour-guide showed a movie and asked if anyone knew the three R’s of recycling. Imagine my shock when my son’s – and only my son’s – hand shot up in the air. As he was proudly reciting “reduce, reuse, recycle,” I glanced at his teacher, who was giving me a look that can only be described as a “nachas look.” She was not only proud of him, she was proud of me! I was now really confused until I realized that she hadn’t taught this to the class. This led her to the misguided assumption that I taught it to my son. Wow, I really had to get to the bottom of this. After the presentation, I quietly pulled my son off to the side and asked him to explain his source for the three R’s. Not realizing that he had just catapulted me to the status of super-mom, he turned to me and innocently said, “I learned it from our Bob the Builder video that we got for a dollar at Goodwill.” Well, that was a dollar well spent. Although the mystery was now solved, I have to admit that I never did confess to his teacher that I had not and probably never would be the source for my son’s knowledge of recycling.
At some point, one has to come to terms with one’s own position on recycling. My day of reckoning was after this trip, when I realized I was probably contributing enough garbage that I could someday expect a landfill to be named after me. I decided I had to do something. I chose the conventional route of simply recycling the stuff from our kitchen.
This didn’t work on many levels. The fact that my garbage can and recycling can are virtually identical, led to multiple mishaps. I couldn’t get down the timing thing, either: garbage on Wednesdays, recycling on Fridays. Finally, being a novice recycler, we only owned one recycling bin. This posed the problem of what you do when you fill up that bin. Unfortunately, we found out the hard way that you can’t put your recycling into plastic bags once your bin is full.
This was too much. So, after experiencing a long struggle filled with inner turmoil, I simply took the path of least resistance: For now, garbage in my house is just garbage. Regarding my visions of recycling, I will periodically remind myself of that glorious day when Bob the Builder came to my rescue and made me into the “recycling mom” I can only hope I will one day become.
