Free, the Backstory

What is the freest stuff on earth? Completely free, as in, Take all you want, and please keep coming back for more! The proper answer is trash. Trash is dry garbage, rubbish, refuse, waste. Once it gets and stays wet, it becomes garbage. Garbage rots, and forms separate issues.

Agriculture and industry have a lot less trash than you and I do, because they have enough of it to be valuable. You can do something with tons of almost anything. You can reuse a few tons of plastic, wood or steel, oils and chemicals, or convert them into something. If bottle makers wasted aluminum and plastic like we do, they would be out of business in days.

Trash is a consumer problem. Swallow that.

Most trash — in a dreadfully ironic way — is what stuff comes in. Stuff comes packaged, wrapped, with instructions and advertising. We put it in larger plastic or paper bags to carry it home, and we pull overflowing 100-gallon trash receptacles to the street each week. Most of it is packaging.

Things that are no longer valuable to us take second place in junk piles. Things old, worn out or stained, chipped, frayed, or just not quite as good as we expect go in the trash. Helen and I threw away a VCR and bunch of tapes, even though they probably still played. It would have cost money and effort to find new homes for them. A friend of ours validly claims, “The reason I don’t shop in junk stores is that it’s junk.”

This is not a rant. It simply demonstrates real and necessary processes in modern life.

Frankly, we have trash systems in place that work quite well. Across most of the United States and Europe, the greatest “trash problem” is people who ignore the processes that are fully in place. Absolutely, the biggest trash problem is littering.

Some people prefer to worry and complain. They say, We have 1.8 million acres of trash in the USA! Yes, a sprawling 20 square miles, or 0.0000818% of our 2.2 billion acres.

Trash in America exists for the simplest of all reasons. There is no greater value in getting rid of it than we already practice. Lots of really smart people have found, and keep finding, new and ingenious ways to use trash. I want to be among them!

That’s the backstory. Now it gets exciting.