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| Litter, dropped by scum |
Last weekend, the family donned a thin cloak of social responsibility and set out for the nearby creek to help with the annual trash clean-up of the Potomac River tributaries. According to our local weekly rag, we were part of an effort that picked out 556 tires, 83,900 “beverage containers”, and almost 15,000 plastic bags. My picture shows a blockage behind a fallen tree of mainly plastic bottles and styrofoam cups in Rock Creek, just down the road from our house. Our section of the creek also yielded a large-sized metal barbeque.
You can look at this positively and celebrate the fact that 3,500 volunteers were prepared to give up their Saturday mornings to get covered in mud and help make the Potomac River a cleaner place. Or you can stand at the side of the creek, as I did, staring down at the rubbish glut and muttering misanthropic clichés about the state of mankind and how we no longer deserve a place on a planet that we continue to rape and pollute.
I have a short song, as yet unrecorded (you’ll be relieved to hear), that goes through my head every time I see litter in natural areas. It’s called ‘Litter-Dropping Scum’, and it’s not very subtle: “You litter-dropping scum/The day will come/I’m gonna get you/With my litter-dropper-killing gun…” Its stated goal is the vigilante-style eradication of anyone who does not dispose of their trash in the correct manner. I’m nothing if not an idealist.
But does clearing out our local creek make us morally superior beings?
To the left is a photograph of our amazing and magical kitchen bin. Regardless of how much rubbish you put in, it never overflows, at least according to the rest of my family. No matter how full it appears, they claim, if you press your new rubbish in hard enough the bin will miraculously create just enough space to allow you to force the lid back down.
Eventually, though, someone comes along who doesn’t believe in magic. That would be me, the first person in the family to get sick of picking up apple cores, chicken bones and bottle tops from around the bottom of the bin when the magic hasn’t quite worked. While the family is out at school and work I’ll empty the bin into the rubbish can outside, and when they come home at the end of the day – abracadabra! The magic bin’s working again!
What they don’t witness is the sight of a severely compressed plastic bag of kitchen waste being eased from its receptacle in an operation that requires strength, skill and patience, all executed with suspended breath to suppress your sense of smell. The dense sack and its festering contents must then be carried down the back steps and into the much more spacious dustbin outside. Often, something sharp or pointed pokes through the plastic, creating a hole through which a malodorous combination of bacon fat, vegetable oil and several indeterminate liquids can create a slick several yards long. But at least a liquid spillage can be mopped up, usually with a sense of relief that, over the course of a week, nothing has mutated inside there to now burst forth with an evil laugh and announce that it intends to kill its creator, and then, ha ha, take over the world.
Yesterday, though, just before I reached the outside bin, the bag split and spilled its entire contents on the ground, and I was privileged to see a geological depiction of what the family had eaten over the past week, composted in layers with a line of moist ground coffee marking the cut-off point for each daily menu. Plus some other stuff. Then I had the pleasure of scooping it all up.
Despite our best efforts to recycle as much glass, plastic and paper as possible, it’s still alarming to be confronted with all the things you’re throwing out (especially when it makes you gag). There was still plenty of garbage in there that will outlive me by thousands of years. It’s probably why the rest of the family prefers to believe in the myth of the never-emptied bin, rather than risk a mucking-in session with fetid peelings, moldering leftovers and, worst of all, discarded items like the blood-smeared thick plastic packaging that encased the ribs of industrially farmed pigs. Oh, the shame.
I cared enough about all this to buy a book called Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte, subtitled ‘On The Secret Trail Of Trash.’ Wired magazine calls it “a riveting travelogue punctuated by a scathing indictment of American consumption.” But although I know I ought to read it, I don’t really want to (I hate being indicted). I bought it in the middle of last year in a brief fit of troubled consciousness, but it keeps getting perused and then placed back at the bottom of my reading pile.
Maybe I’m hoping that one day I’ll look at the pile of books and – abracadabra! Garbage Land will have magically disappeared.
