What about the trash?

I was recently talking to a long-term friend in the U.S. about where I live and how I live. She asked "what do you do with the trash?" I explained there is virtually none and started my details with "we probably open one can a week, maybe less". Well, that just did not compute.

Thinking back to my Seattle days, while I cooked a lot of my food from mostly fresh ingredients, I certainly did generate a lot more trash. In just cans, there was more than one a week. It might be canned corn, canned peas, ... Those items are just a lot more seasonal in Seattle.

While I would buy beans and rice in bulk, there were just a lot of things can came in a box or a jar of some kind. Here, the stuff that is pre-packaged tends to come in a plastic bag (all the way to mustard) or in a high-tech plastic and metal film bag. A good example of the latter is TSP.

You don't even see egg cartons. For a small quantity, they get put in a plastic bar. For more, they sit on top of egg crate packing and, if you are going far, they will tie another one on top with string. The assumption is that you will return them.

So, what's left? Paper and cardboard you can burn. Plastic bags get either re-used as a plastic bag or move along to an additional use such as a red flag for a long load on your truck. In the bottles and jars area, some bottles can be returned. Others and jars in particular move on to store something new. The useless plastic bottles and even paint cans mostly go on to become homes for plants.

Aluminum cans can be recycled and this process can be "automated" by giving them to kids who know how and where to get paid for them. Sacos that contained dog food, rice and flour become storage bags or recyclable trash sacks.

Food scraps and such are "food". If it isn't for the dogs then it goes to the compost pile which also gets the "aged" waste from the composting toilet and the grass clippings if you still call it clippings when it was produced by the use of a machete. Fallen oak leaves go to the mulch pit, an area where the greywater from the sinks and shower seep back into the water table.

That really leaves me with the occasional tin can, some plastic-metal film bags and a bit of discarded plastic. The volume? Generally less than a kitchen-sized trash can per month. Lacking a good local use/solution, a saco of that stuff goes to Estelí on our pretty much now monthly food run.