We are a nation of garbage specialists: we make garbage better than we do almost anything else. Taking proper care of what we discard is an inescapable part of taking care of ourselves. Garbage, like the dependent home, is a modern invention, and a phenomenon without parallel in nature. Only upstart humankind has perfected the art of making waste so disgusting that it cannot serve as food for other organisms. With wonder in our voices, we tell our children that the plains Indians used every part of the buffalo. Of course they did! Every part was useful. In one century, humans have evolved a garbage culture that has converted the Earth's plenty into a suffocating blanket that offers to bury the planet in pollution and waste. A few decades hence, when our grandchildren take us to task, independent homesteaders want to be able to say, "Not us; we were pioneers, trying to figure out how to do it right!" As each community's Mount Trashmore looms, market pressure -- the rising cost of dumping -- has made us more careful about our garbage. We pay better attention to unlumping our garbage: separating trash from materials that may be recycled. The more finely we practice unlumping, the less energy is required to return the refuse to its proper place in the natural order. As a people, we are slowly beginning to get control of our trash habits, and learning to reduce, reuse, and recycle. The waning of the garbage culture proves that when motivated, we are an adaptable and thrifty people.
Anyone who has tried to find something mistakenly thrown in the garbage understands the problem; the motley accumulation in the bin shares only one quality: Someone judged them to be of no immediate use. Acculturated from birth to loathe our offal, we compound absent-minded reflex with a fetish: Once devalued by consignment to the trash, a discarded item is somehow sullied, and it is considered indecent to salvage it; polite people simply don't go through the trash, their own or anyone else's. So the reflex to trash something is perceived as irreversible.
Independent homesteaders regard "essential" garbage appliances with suspicion. Garbage disposals are a bad idea, adding energy to compost before sending it to the sewer or septic tank; this is like throwing good money after good. The garden needs the compost. Trash compactors were a marginally good idea until garbage trucks, dumps, and refuse transfer stations started applying much more powerful and efficient ones to the waste stream. Power mulchers accomplish immediate results, but patient composting in a garden mulch pile works as well and saves energy.
Our garbage waste problem and our energy waste problem are close kin; easily 75 percent of what most folks throw away can be turned to better use on the independent homestead.
- Start out by not buying trash or not bringing trash home.
- Next, for those of us who practice unlumping, it is a natural next step to separate and collect discards appropriately. A quick count of recycling sites around our homestead finds twenty-four caches, from "battery hell" where the nicads go when they die, to five distinct paper recycling bins.
- Finally, by reusing the materials we stockpile, or by passing our gleanings back to industries that can profitably reclaim their precious elements, we further the reform of attitudes about the reclamation and redemption of garbage.
The Unburn Pile
As a nation, the United States of America produces more yard waste than any other kind of garbage. We are fascinated by fire, and over the centuries have learned to use it wisely, for ceremony, warmth, and cooking. Around the construction site and the land, we have also learned to abuse fire. Laws forbidding agricultural fires in the U.S. and elsewhere are finally affecting the turf, sugarcane, tree, and rice farming industries, to the benefit of air-breathing creatures around the world. On the domestic scale, burning the backyard trash pile is one of autumn's pervasive rites . . . but it is wrong. Why burn? The rapid oxidation of all that organic material has no purpose beyond our cultural preference for bare earth. Of course, we cannot help it if a little plastic, a little painted wood, and who knows what else happen to have been dumped in the pile.
In Caspar, I have made the decision to stop burning the piles, but I keep making them. The traditional pile where we carry the cuttings and slash has not been lit for six years now, and, surprisingly, it is no larger than it has ever been. The slower oxidation fomented by the earth's microorganisms is less spectacular, but it keeps up with the garden. Unexpectedly, birds and other small creatures have developed a thriving community in our unburn pile, and fuchsia cuttings have colonized the pile's north side. Nature has begun to reclaim her basic building materials. We are more disciplined now about what goes on the pile: nothing human-made, nor even things shaped by humans, such as lumber and cardboard; these things are burned in the woodstove for heat, along with orange peels, the few putrescibles we produce, and other things that do not belong in a healthy compost pile. In time, a decade or two hence, we may abandon this pile and start another one elsewhere. A few months or years thereafter, we will have a rich mound where there might have been nothing more than ashes and dead earthworms.
Our fascination with fire has led to the industrial-scale employment of giant regional incinerators. In practice, these monsters seldom work as well as in the lab, and incinerators require large amounts of material to keep running. In Dade County, which includes Miami, and on Long Island, which incorporates the thickly settled suburbs of New York City, incinerator operators routinely purchase recyclable garbage from neighboring communities to keep their high-tech fires burning. In theory, incinerators can dispose safely of toxics, including chemical and biological weapons, but few communities would favor having these substances imported from afar and burned with questionable results, even if the cogeneration contribution of the incinerator to the local electrical utility's energy mix substantially reduced their electric rates. A parallel lesson has been learned since medical waste started washing ashore along the eastern seaboard in 1994: in the not too distant past, garbage was heedlessly flung into the ocean, which was assumed to be infinite. This idea being disproved, profiteers would now dump in the atmosphere, or even in outer space. Anyone with an elementary grasp on the meaning of sustainability would say this is a terrible (but typical) notion.
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