Rethinking trash
Willo Kelly is the director and founder of BlueGreen Outer Banks, an effort to promote a healthy environment while maintaining a healthy economy. www.bluegreenouterbanks.com »
How many of you have been pulled into watching the shows “Clean House” and “Hoarders,” shows that take you into the homes of people who can’t seem to throw anything away and typically go overboard buying things they don’t need? Their homes essentially become self-contained trash heaps or storage areas filled floor with “stuff!”
Reflecting on the premise of these shows, I thought about the idea of having to live with everything I have ever thrown away. Scary thought – stinky, smelly thought.
My 83-year old Aunt recently visited, and our conversations sparked some old memories. We talked about visiting my grandmother in the mountains of southwestern Virginia when I was a little girl.
My grandmother lived in a modest two-story house on a hill just on the outskirts of town. She had the convenience of running water, plumbing and electricity, but she didn’t have the benefit and convenience of trash pick-up like we do today. She therefore accumulated very little trash. She didn’t buy what she didn’t need. Old clothes were handed down or cut up for quilts, rugs, potholders or other useful objects. Food scraps were turned into a casserole or given to the dogs. It was a big no-no to waste food! Aluminum pie pans were reused or tied to blackberry bushes to keep the birds away.
Packaging was very different compared to today and certainly made a difference when it came to accumulating waste. Meats were not pre-packaged in styrofoam and plastic. You went to the meat counter and it was wrapped in paper. Soft drinks were not widely available in 2-liter plastic bottles. They were in aluminum cans or glass bottles. You left a deposit and returned them to the store so they could be reused by the bottling companies.
Now let’s go back and “rethink” living with every piece of trash we have thrown away. Even if not in our own home or backyard – what if we didn’t have the convenience of landfills located elsewhere (out of sight – out of mind) and each town on the Outer Banks had to handle its own trash. We would rethink packaging and how we buy things. We would look at plastic – that never completely breaks down – a little differently. We would probably be paying for trash pick-up and recycling would be free.
There is great book I would like to recommend that fits right in with BlueGreen’s philosophy that we need to “rethink the impacts of what we do today because tomorrow matters!” The book focuses on “remaking the way we make things”.
Cradle to Cradle, written by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, is being read by UNC students to assist them in this fall’s Capstone Project on the Outer Banks. You’ll hear more about that soon.
So tell me what you think. And if you’ve got any ideas on how we can reuse items or reduce waste on the Outer Banks, chime in.
Join the discussion: