What a topic! We are now a society which has to manage its trash. We should be ashamed that we have put together and are living a lifestyle where our trash can hurt us and others; takes up much of the world as we export it to other countries to let them handle what we throw away; think nothing about it – just dump wherever, whenever.

Household trash costs us a lot of money to manage. Just think – some companies have a John Doe working for them who is Vice President of Trash. CEO of Junk Removal. President of Trash Collection – all because we don’t want to have to live a more prudent, clean, thoughtful life.

Your trash collection program starts at the grocery store. PLASTICS. I heard, sometime ago, don’t know where I was at the time, that the plastics industry originated and is now owned and managed by the mafia. Don’t know which one. Maybe there is a mafia community group made up of representatives of the Irish, Italian, Black, Indian, Asian, Mafia. They get together periodically to decide how to split the enormous profits generated by the plastics industry. Could be just a rumor.

At the grocery store you decide during each trip what to buy. Your decision on what to buy, hopefully, is colored by what the containers are like that encase the food you choose. Minimus containers are what we choose. Somehow, we will find what is in those incredible creations of plastic someplace else is some covering which is easy to dispose.

Baked cakes, etc. are big violators of the environment. They now come in plastic boxes with big tops to keep those who handle the cakes from crushing their product before it reaches your hands.

Try disposing of those containers. We wash every container before throwing it out. Sometimes you have to soak the “plate” part of the cake containers before throwing them out. When you do that you will find that sometimes there are three and four layers of cardboard, plastic and paper that have to be washed. Cake pieces, especially icing, will get between those layers and make your job more difficult. And then you have to dispose of those tall tops – shaped like the tops of elegant buildings. We even find that many cookies and other flat pastries now come with such tops. To give the cookies room to breathe? How are we supposed to dispose of such – and once we do, will it take several lifetimes for the plastic domes to disintegrate or do they last forever!

And then there are the water bottles. Water, water, everywhere and none to drink. Tens of thousands of water bottles – all plastic – everywhere you look. In the mornings, as I leave the house I have to pick up two or three such bottles which have been thrown in my garden. What am I supposed to do with other folks garbage?

We are really old. So old that we remember decades ago when water in bottles that you would carry with you first became a “thing”. In those days there were still warnings about drinking water in plastic bottles. Enough of the plastic would melt into the water making it dangerous if we drank too much water from those plastic bottles. Later came warnings about drinking water from plastic bottles which sat out in the sun too long. Today, those warnings are about destroying the earth with all of those plastic bottles.

We started drinking Mountain Valley Water at that point. It was the only bottled water we could find in glass bottles. That works fantastically well if you drink one or two bottles a month. Otherwise, other kinds of problems crop up. When we returned the Mountain Valley Water bottles to the store to get our deposit back we felt really good. We felt as though we were doing our part to save the environment. And then we learned they did not go back to the manufacturer to be washed and refilled with water to be put out for sale again. They just got picked up by the hauling company that picked up the grocers garbage and thrown out just like the plastic bottles.

And then there are the newspapers. Only here begains a solution to the “trash” problem. As your newspapers collect, keep them very clean and neatly stacked and when you go out take a stack with you to be dropped off at Estate Sales. They are in everybody’s neighborhood and are always looking for wrapping papers for the fragile items they sell. You can look up the estate sale locations – try “estate sales.net”, go a little out of your way and drop them at the closest place having a sale. You can do the same in spring, summer and fall at your neighborhood “garage sale” or other kind of related sales. They will be most grateful. What you have done is passed on to those who buy items wrapped in your newspapers the problem of disposing of the old, now crushed papers they have from their purchases. Of course, another way to do this is to save your newspapers and drop them off at the home of one of your neighbors who frequents estate sales.

Food waste, of course, goes down the disposal, except for those items for which your disposal is not rated to accept and then you have to look around and find other ways to dispose of that waste.

This gets really complicated. And then there is the waste from corporations and manufacturing companies and energy companies and, O God how did we get here? Can’t we find another way to live without such waste problems, which are increasing exponentially by the hour?

How do you dispose of your waste? Let us know. We are looking – and so are others – to turn our waste into something usable instead of throwing out so much. Do we need major lifestyle changes? Our ethical base updated? Our caring for others re-upped? What!