I find that I am beginning to dread my daily trips to the trash can. For decades I have just thrown things into the garbage can next to my desk, or under my kitchen sink, whenever I needed something. But now I find I have become plagued with guilt, or maybe just disgust. My life, like those of almost all “modern” lives depends upon using things that come from somewhere else, and made by someone (or something) else. While I have a very large back yard, almost nothing that I use or eat comes from here. It is all shipped to me, or I go get it from a store that collects a lot of stuff from all over the world for me to select and purchase.

The fact that not only am I no even in the slightest way “self-sufficient” but everything that comes my way uses fossil fuels to get here is pretty disturbing. However, not only does it come to me using highly damaging fossil fuel vehicles, but it comes in packages that I immediately throw in the garbage. Much of the things that come in the mail get tossed before they are even glanced at. Many, perhaps most, of the products that I get come in packaging that not only gets tossed as soon as I finish wresting the product out of its package, but that package immediately gets tossed. When I take the garbage out I notice that the “waste” from the actual things that I want is almost zero. All the food gets eaten, the batteries get recycled (I hope), the tools usually stick around for years, almost nothing actually gets thrown out – except for the mountains and mountains of useless packaging.

I have started to feel like a cog in the jaws of some giant machine whose only purpose is to take valuable, and inherently benign, raw materials and transform them into highly polluting and dangerous industrial level garbage. It is a steady flow of good stuff to bad stuff, with me as a part of the bucket brigade taking the junk and passing it along to the next step. Perhaps a tiny bit gets recycled a few times before it finally falls off the end of the chain as waste. The waste comes in many forms that we keep hearing about. The end of the cycle seems to be things like carbon dioxide, tiny particles of plastic filling every space in the water systems (oceans, lakes, rivers), mountains of stuff in landfills slowly (or not so slowly) oozing poisons into the ground and our water, mountains of stuff just sitting in the hopes that someday it will vanish (which is not the case during many lifetimes).

We all know, and lament, the story. We are destroying the world as we knew it 200 years ago (or in my case, seventy years ago). None of us are directly to blame, and none of us has much control over the process. However, lately I have become much more aware of my hands moving good stuff one step closer to useless stuff, bit-by-bit with almost no thought or action in the process. I open a package of batteries and immediately reach down to throw the waste into the trash. I buy a pound of beans at the store and immediately throw the flimsy little plastic bag I put it in while shopping into the garbage. I buy my new shirt, and immediately cut off and throw away tags, labels and packaging. I throw away more packaging from the sausages that I cook for dinner than the contents of the sausage.

Everything is sterile, clean, safe and packaged for easy shipping and display – and then discarded into the waiting mountain of trash. I have come to realize that unless, or until, this conveyor belt of good stuff to trash without a use in the middle comes to an end we are never going to find a solution. I don’t suppose that “the solution” is to stop that process – stopping it will occur because we found a better solution to the entire system of moving things from hither to yon. Perhaps it will entail smaller, closer sources of things so that we can get there under our own power (walking, roller skating, bicycling, etc) and can just bring home what we want, not all of the other stuff that comes with it. I don’t see a clear view of that future, but I can see a clear view of what happens if we don’t find solutions to the every growing stream of valuable resources being turned from good stuff to junk with no value or use along the way.