Trash

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this latest move, it’s that I accumulate a lot of garbage over the years.

There have been eight trips out of my apartment, carrying four large bags each, and once was a car load of cardboard to the recyclers and another time was all of my old, useless electronics.  And I’m not done, because I have four large bags of glass that needs to go to the recyclers, and I’m pretty sure there’s still more garbage to be found over the course of the next two days.  Including the large amount of coins that I took into the bank this morning, the total back from the recycling has been about 125 dollars.  Keep in mind, there’s no monetary incentive for recycling a television or a computer.  In fact, there’s quite the opposite, because the town charges you to put garbage into their landfill.

But just think of that for a moment had all of that which I recycled (which is about 75%) had gone to a landfill instead.  Pop bottles and cans, several rum bottles (Captain Morgan’s to be precise), all that electronics, cardboard, glass, and beer bottles would have added about 250 pounds to the local landfill.  Now multiply that by 2500 (estimated population of Outlook), and you have how much garbage would be dumped.  Mine is on the low side, I’m sure, because while waiting to recycling my pop bottles and such, there was a young couple in front of me with about ten black garbage bags full of plastic, glass and tin pop and beer bottles and cans.  I’m sure that they too were on the low side of the average.

Not a day went by in my nine years in Outlook when I didn’t see someone using the many different aspects of recycling in town.  Whether that be taking alcohol bottles to the liquor board store, recycling pop bottles and cans at Sarcan, or filling up the recycling boxes around town with cardboard, newsprint, high grade paper and magazines, tin cans, milk containers, and glass.  I’ve seen the numbers on how much this community recycles.  It’s in the millions.  Think about that for a moment.  Millions of bottles, cans, pieces of paper, newsprint, and other items that would have gone to the landfill had a recycling plan not been put in place.

So in the long run, even though I have had a lot of garbage go out my door, most of it was recycled.  And my contribution has actually had a huge monetary affect on this community.