How Much Junk Do We Put Into Trash Bags for the Sanitation Department Now?
Wood Toy Bins
I am a single man. My demographic cross-section of the population probably generates the least amount of trash in a given month. Yet, I manage to put out around eight 30 gallon bags of trash each month, give or take a few. If you have a medium sized family, you may put out twice that amount of trash and junk in a month. This is not a bad reflection on us. We are not bad people because we have a lot of waste and junk. Most of the stuff we throw away is packaging of some sort, and then there are other raw goods which we feel we are unable to use.
Wood Toy Bins
One of the reasons we generate so much trash is because we are a consumer society. That is, most of what we use in the course of a day comes in some sort of a box, or carton, or bottle, or crate. We bring them home in sacks, and what we do not use we store in ziploc baggies. After that, we take a mylar bag from a box and we put the leftovers in them and put them in the trash can for the Sanitation department to pick up. Societies of the past were not like this at all. Most of the time there was no Sanitation department to come by and pick up people's waste products. Societies of the past made it a habit to recycle their trash and junk into useful household items, or fertilizer, or even art. The things they absolutely could not use, they either burned or buried.
Folks in the past soon figured out that some of their livestocks' (and even their own) sewage produced something called Greywater with which they were able to create an oasis. Before long, they had green grass, bountiful crops, and even a great scarecrow to scare off the birds made out of the junk and trash the owner chose to recycle. Waste management has long been the staple of the imaginative homesteader who lived in a diy world. There was nobody to do it for him, so he did it himself.
Most of us do not think about the quantity of trash we produce because it is so neatly carted away that we do not notice it. But, what if there was no Sanitation department? What if you continued to stack up those sacks of what you consider to be junk and trash? At the rate of 50 to 90 full 30 gallon bags of trash a month, it would not be long before you had a mountain in your back yard. Supposing that a full 30 gallon trash bag is two feet wide by three feet tall, just the first layer would amount to 1,800 square feet of bags. How much room is that? It is the size of a medium sized house. Surely, we can use some of the stuff we throw away and recycle it into something else. What happens when we do this? We start getting our moneys worth from the things we consume. We may actually be throwing away 25 percent of the value of the things we buy simply because someone else has convinced us it was trash! Imagine how you would feel if someone handed you 0 in one dollar bills and you burned 25 of them into thin air. You would not do that, would you? But we do essentially the same thing with what we consider waste every month, only the dollar amounts may be much greater. Your mileage may vary.
How Can I Categorize the Trash I Have for Recycling Junk?
Usually we have been exposed to the concept of recycling at work. That is, there is a bin for plastic, a bin for paper, a bin for wood, and so forth. We do it because it is company policy, but when the bin goes out the door and comes back empty, we do not give it a second thought. All we have done is categorize the stuff we do not wish to use anymore into someone else's organization regime. They will cart off what we have given them and either make money from it, or turn it into something else that is valuable. That is why they want it. Your company probably gets some sort of monetary reward for giving it to them as well, but not nearly as much as the people taking the waste out of the recycle bins.
So, what are we looking at here? Most people divide trash into plastic, glass, and organic waste. Since we are looking to use what we divide, we may want to gear how we divide our recycling into the kinds of things we may want to make out of it, or task it for re-use.
I use candles every month. A great deal of the candle can be made to recycle into, you guessed it, more candles! So, I may want to have a container that is only devoted to the wax that melts off the candle. I also have other organic material that I throw away that could be used in compost which would eventually form great fertilizer. The paper that I throw away could probably be used as either kindling for things I burn, or it could be used to turn into paper mache or some other product that I could use in an art project. Aluminum cans could be melted down and forged into something completely different. It all depends on what you want to recycle your junk or trash into.
There are any number of new thought disciplines for Wells and Septic Systems that country folks are using to help grow their crops and green up their grass. In some areas, because of ground percolation failures, many are using alternatives to septic tanks that have to do with recycling that waste into greywater for growing things to compost for gardens. If you walk into a thrift store, a craft shop, a craft chain store, or other like Mom and Pop type establishments, you will begin to notice items that you could easily make from the things you throw away.
If you group your plastics by their quality, these can easily be re-melted and formed into other items, provided they have been adequately cleaned so that any impurities from their first use are gone. What would you melt your plastics down to? Could they be army men or some other toy that would not pose a danger? To what means could you recycle the everyday plastics in your life? Plastics are horrible for garbage as they do not decompose or contribute to the Earth's environment, so you may as well get imaginative and come up with other items you could task waste plastic into.
How Can I Know What Items to Recycle from Junk into Useful Items?
Plastics, metals, paper, cloth, and rubber can all be put to second uses. There are probably tons of other materials that can be used to recycle into other every day items. The more you use your imagination, the more things you will be able to make out of junk. Think of the things you currently use, or have ever used, that were made of plastics, paper, cloth, or metal. How much of any one item could you make if you would but just recycle one material?
There are fantastic books on recycling waste into compost that can be used to grow crops which will later become food for your family. The possibilities are limitless, but you have to commit to the idea of taking trash, junk, and waste, and turning it into a brand new valuable possession. So now it is time to draw bubbles. We call it brainstorming. Take the list of raw materials, and there are probably more than we have mentioned, and put them into big bubbles on a large sheet of paper. From each of these bubbles, draw other circles that radiate out from the source material circles. These secondary circles will be the possible items we can make from the material we recycle. See, once we do it intentionally, it is not nearly as difficult as we may have imagined.
How To Dispose of Trash that is Not Suitable for Recycling
Of course, there will certainly be trash that is really trash and junk that is really junk. You know you will have to dispose of it. Often you will be able to incinerate this stuff, or sometimes you can bury it. Then again, you may have to actually have someone haul it off for you. It certainly beats having 1800 square feet of garbage in the back yard does it not? And, on top of that, you have gotten, in most cases, 25 percent more out of the money that you spent on the original item simply by attempting to use everything that came with it and in it.
Nothing I have said here is exhaustive, but is intended to help you get your creative juices flowing. Almost Everything can be recycled into something you really want. The big trick here is to be able to identify what it is you want, and then assess whether what you are throwing away can fill that need. I hope I have given you a good start in the right direction. Remember to do your own research. You can probably come up with even more ideas!
What Waste or Junk Do You Produce That Is Good For Recycling?
Wood Toy Bins
Nov 11, 2011 12:43:26
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