Legacy of Waste
The Exhausting Calculus of Harming None
I recently killed the first two paper coffee cups I've killed in over a decade. My community service commitment obliged me to attend several days of training in a seedy desert casino a couple of hours north and west of here. I found myself trapped there with thousands of excessive consumers.
When I travel, which is rarely, I bring herbal tea along. The first evening I took my clean stainless steel travel cup to the restaurant closest to the elevators to get some hot water so I could go back to my room and make a relaxing cup of tea. I asked the server to fill my cup with hot water. Oblivious to the point, he brought a paper cup of hot water, poured it into my stainless, crumpled the paper cup, and tossed it in a trash can as he walked away.
I was gobsmacked. As gobsmacked as the woman who'd checked me in earlier had been when I turned down two 'complimentary' plastic bottles of water.
“Oh, no, thank you,” I said, “I haven't killed a plastic water bottle in a very long time.”
“But, they're free,” she stammered, “you can put them in the refrigerator in your room.”
I flourished my battered old water bottle, never far from my hand, and said “This one goes in the refrigerator filled with tap, just as well.”
She looked at me like I'd just stepped off a space ship. “But, they're free . . .”
The second paper cup I killed as inadvertently as the first. I took my stainless to the coffee kiosk the next morning and handed it to the barista to get a cuppa. I have done this without drama so many times in so many coffee shops it didn't occur to me that the barista couldn't, or wouldn't know what to do with it. I could barely hear her over the cacophony of the casino, and was paying attention to securing my wallet in my bag as she told me “I can't fill that, it's against health department regulations.” Smacked again, I couldn't react quickly enough.
“Uhhhhh . . .” She had my money and my name on a paper cup before I could recover my wits enough to cancel my order.
It wasn't until the evening of my third day in casino hell that I found a food outlet which would bring a carafe of coffee to the table at dinner I could fill my stainless from. I brought the coffee back to my room and drank it tepid the next morning.
It was a painfully tedious, three-step process to strip the bulbs from the Christmas lights on my old homemade outdoor decoration. The old strings of inefficient lights had lasted for almost twenty years so I didn't have any real complaints. There were five, 150-bulb strings wrapped around the two-foot-tall, flame-shaped frame the guys in the locomotive shop fabricated for me. I bolt it to the top of the Maypole to make it into a Yule candle in the dark of the year.
The first step was to untangle the lights from the frame. Clearly it never occurred to me that I might have to do this for they were impressively, impossibly tangled. It took wire cutters and a jigsaw puzzle mentality to get them off. The second step was to pry up a tiny plastic clip that held each bulb securely in its socket. I remember thinking these little clips were a great feature when I bought the lights. Now I know better. Now I know they're evil. I jabbed my hands repeatedly with the tiny screwdriver required for this task. Ultimately I surrendered to reality and put on work gloves, which saved on bloodshed but impeded the detailed work. The third step was to work along the length of the string and pull the bulbs from their sockets with a pair of pliers. Working my way up and down the first string took over three hours and left me with terrible back and neck pain.
Only 600 bulbs to go. My technique eventually improved, but I could only do half a string at a sitting, and that made the project stretch to the horizon. I swallowed the lump in my throat thinking of this painful tedium, but I stayed the course because I am acutely aware of what I throw away and what becomes of it. I had called the Hazardous Waste Department at the county landfill about my Christmas lights and they had given me hope that, sans bulbs, they would accept the old lights because the wire in them could be recycled.
It wasn't until the third string I finally grasped that I needed to pull the socket away from the bulb rather than pull the bulb away from the socket. It is a subtle difference in technique, but one that made all the difference. When I pulled at the bulb, the pliers slipped on about one bulb in five, and the pliers broke the glass. The earthworms living under the front porch will suffer because of the microshards of glass I let get away from me in this way.
Pulling the socket from the bulb, though, required leverage from my arthritic thumb that turned the project into torture on a whole new level. I remained committed to it though, because I can walk away from this project until my pain abates in a way Mother Nature cannot. If I throw the Christmas lights away, She's stuck with them for geologic time.
I am green. I was born this way.
I bullied my boss into letting me flex my work time to help put together a community event for the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day in 1990. He wasn't happy about it but I was too valuable to fire and he got over it. I volunteered hundreds of hours coordinating the recycling arm of the big event. It was a spectacular success. We recycled tons. Tons more than had been anticipated. We had to call for more rolloffs before noon. Although I couldn't browbeat my boss into the flex time to help with it in subsequent years, my beloved recycling fair became a fixed feature of the Earth Day celebrations in Flagstaff and the city eventually went on to establish a recycling program.
The most radical thing you can do is stay home. Gary Snyder
Home is enough for me.
Home is sacred space, a sanctuary. In my adult life I have always been willing to take the financial hit living in paradise demands. Poverty with a view is not a joke. Most people have to leave home to experience the natural world I am blessed to live in every day. The disadvantage, at the risk of stating the obvious, is the poverty. But I am rich in so many ways. Ways that cannot be reduced to monetary valuation by any manner of calculus. I have dark, stars, dirt, fresh air, quiet, and an extended close-knit family of trees, animals, birds, people, and native plants. I am happy and fulfilled at home, so my carbon footprint is next to nil for vacation travel. This is how I justify the carbon cost of driving 120 miles round trip to take my labor-intensive Christmas lights to the county transfer station.
I proudly present my paper sack to the young man working in the hazardous waste area. He glances in the bag and says “Oh, we don't take those.” My heart sinks to my shoes. “We could throw them away for you, though.” he offers, helpfully.
“Um, is Eric here? I called and spoke with him . . .”
“Yeah. ERIC!!'
Eric, from a loft somewhere in the back of the cavernous building hollers back. “Yeah?”
“Lady says she talked to you about Christmas lights.”
“Yeah, I told her we would take 'em if the bulbs were stripped.”
“Oh,” He checks for bulbs and says with a smile, “If Eric says it's okay, it's okay.”
I am so relieved when he takes them I don't even ask for the paper bag back although it still has some good life left in it.
“Thank you, and thank Eric for me.”
I get a Right, lady, whatever, look and start for home, sixty miles away.
The addict in me tastes the desperation in the blinking, clanging cacophony of the seedy desert casino. Underlying the shallow valuation of everything in terms of money is the fraught quest of the addict to change the way I feel. Alcoholics drink to escape the dreary ordinariness and petty anguishes of their lives. Others go to a casino and hope to hit it big for the same reason.
My lifetime of frugality with waste wouldn't offset a single day's operation here. People go to places like the casino to be excessive: excessively wasteful, excessively hedonistic, excessively skanky. They are looking for instant gratification. My long view is alien here.
One person wasting two paper coffee cups a decade is not the end of the world. Las Vegas has 150,000 motel rooms. Figure two people per room per night and that's 600,000 paper cups a day, over two hundred million of them a year. A tragedy beyond reckoning.
Consider the triangular recycling symbol. The three arrows pointing to each other are for reduce, reuse, and recycle. It also illustrates the ecological circularity of the biosphere. We get back from the world what we put out into it. We are the only ones (!) who can save ourselves from drowning in our own waste.
Some say recycling is an exercise in futility, that we have passed the tipping point where it will make any difference. But it makes a difference to Mother Earth, and it certainly makes a difference to the tree that doesn't have to die to make the paper coffee cup. I'm an old woman now and, like most egotistical humans, I hope to be remembered after I'm gone. I'd like to be remembered for the quality of my compassion, perhaps, or something compelling and beautiful I have written. I'd like my legacy to be my happy heart, not the mountain of trash I left behind me. I didn't have the time to spend all those painful hours stripping the cursed Christmas lights, but I made time for it because, for me and my house, we will serve the Goddess.
Please recycle.
Please reuse.
Please reduce.
It's not too late.
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and to functioning recycling programs wherever they may be found.
Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
Together, we are MoonLit Press.