Photo credit:  The Boston Globe

A few years ago I heard something that stuck in my head:  there is no away.

We don’t get to throw anything away.  We have to burn or bury or sink deep into the ocean all of the crap we use up and don’t want anymore.

None of these disposal options are terrific for our planet, or all that permanent–remember the needles washing up on the gorgeous Jersey shore a decade or so ago?

As a family and a business we’ve been trying to reduce the amount of stuff we have, so that we can get rid of less stuff (and have less stuff to manage and maintain) but we still throw away heaps of garbage every Tuesday morning.

According to www.onconcord.com, the average person in the state of New Hampshire throws away 7.1 pounds of garbage a day, or more than a ton a year.  I shiver to think of the total that my politically incorrectly sized family of 7 is responsible for adding to our landfills every year, even with the huge amount of recycling we haul out to the curb for bi-weekly pick up.

Like a lot of other places, New Hampshire’s state and local budgets are suffering in this economic downturn, and every cost center is being scrutinized for potential savings.

Frankly, it was no surprise to find that here in Concord we are switching to a Pay as You Throw rubbish removal system.  Basically, every homeowner has to buy special purple bags for a dollar or two, and the city will only pick up those bags on trash day.

There was a lot of push back on this proposal.  Some people felt that PAYT is just a fancy name for a new tax.  And sure, two bucks a bag is more than I pay for even the reeeeeally good and stretchy Heftys, but I get that we have to plug a giant hole in the city budget, and I don’t think that maintaining the current level of “free” rubbish removal is worth further cuts to the library or other essential services.

What is great about the program is that it will force more and more people to recycle more and more stuff.

As my darling Republican husband says, government get less of what it taxes.

So if buying the bags equates to paying a tax, maybe we’ll get less garbage and hopefully that will mean more recycling.

Here at greenpoma.com we offer end of life recycling kits for CFLs and recycling kits for regular batteries.

We don’t make much profit on them, but we too are concerned with adding more mercury to our environment and wanted to find an easy and safe way to get rid of their bulbs when they eventually burn out.

We have one of each of these boxes tucked into a corner of the shelf on the basement stairs, and when they are full, we’ll seal the up and send them off, secure in the knowledge that they will be properly dismantled and recycled.

Now if only we could figure out how to put the spinning composter together.

I

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Green Goals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.