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Talking trash in the neighborhood
April 12, 2008, 12:05 AM
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Tuesday is trash day in my neighborhood. Every Tuesday morning, I deposit our trash cans, bags full of weeds that I had finally pulled and a giant box, which once contained the latest piece of exercise equipment that I bought but will never use, on the curb in front of my house.
If you drive through my neighborhood on Tuesday, you'll see that almost everyone has filled their can, pulled their weeds, and invested in a giant "perfect body with little or no effort" machine, just like me.
As a species, humans seem to be quite messy. I'm no scientist, but I can't think of any other species that create a huge stream of solid waste that, shall we say ... isn't part of their natural bodily functions. And based on a Tuesday afternoon drive through my neighborhood, we create a lot of it.
Any investigative journalist worth his salt would engage in some exhaustive research to find out just how much solid waste we're generating, where it all goes and what the possible environmental impact of all that trash might have on future generations ... but I'm a humor columnist and way too lazy to do that kind of research.
Instead, I did what I do best: looked at two Web sites and jumped to some unsupportable, but hopefully amusing, conclusions.
According to the EPA's latest figures on municipal solid waste, each American generates 4.6 pounds of trash every day. That works out to about 32.2 pounds a week and 1,674 pounds of trash on the curb per person every year. Speaking strictly for myself, about half of that trash is junk mail, beer cans and pizza boxes which, while environmentally unfortunate, are an unavoidable reality of modern living.
That leaves about 837 pounds of discretionary trash that I can work to reduce to do my part for the environment. I'm talking about stuff like oatmeal boxes, broken shovels and torn work clothes that fill up our trash cans but contribute so little to the true quality of our lives. I'm willing to make a commitment right now to stop buying oatmeal, lawn tools and any sort of work related item that might eventually become trash. That's just the kind of civic-minded guy I am.
The problem is that, even if everyone cut their discretionary trash production in half, the U.S. population is growing so fast that we'll eventually end up buried in a pile of trash. I looked the U.S. Census Bureau Population Clock, where they keep a running count of the current population. There were 303,823,411 Americans contributing their 4.6 pounds of daily trash, as of April 3.
As a species, it seems that the one thing we produce more prolifically than trash is more people. In the minute or less that I spent looking at the Population Clock, it increased by seven people! Again, always civic-minded, I'm willing to pledge that I will not father any more children.
Some of you may argue that since I already have four children and six grandchildren, I'm part of the problem, but you would be wrong. There is more to the population equation than how many people you bring into this world; it's critical to count the number of folks you've taken out.
I don't mean to imply that I'm some kind of mass murderer or serial killer; I'm simply suggesting that I may have contributed to some population reduction along the way. When I was a kid, there were several teachers who swore that I would be the death of them, countless women who responded to my advances by saying, "You're killing me, here!" and two wives who have claimed at some point that I was sucking the life out of them. While I never actually witnessed any of these people drop dead, I'm willing to take them at their word, so I figure that I've more than covered the kids I contributed. It's all about zero population growth.
Clearly, overpopulation and solid-waste disposal are very serious problems that require serious answers. Just as clearly, those answers are not going to come from a grandpa who orders pizza twice a week and throws away the bag my beer comes in, whether it's paper or plastic. But that doesn't mean there isn't hope. I've sworn off treadmills, so you won't be seeing that big box on my curb next Tuesday.
- Rick Seley is a resident of Fallon.
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