I had to visit my local landfill the other day, to dump the deck I took out. If you ever wanted motivation to reduce your consumption and your trash output, just sit around at your local landfill for a while.
I had to dump the deck. There was no way around that … the unknown chemicals in the wood meant that it could not be reused for anything else. It was painful to drive past the "reclaimed wood" pile to dump the wood in the general landfill pile, but it had to be done. Spending an afternoon yielded several thoughts, however:
- There was a truck there from a window company dumping an entire truckload of used windows. Can those not be reused for something? There just seems like there would be better ways of disposing of them – putting them in houses, or using them for cold frames, or melting down the materials for other things. (They seemed to have aluminum frames.) Every time they tossed a window in the pit and I heard it crash, it made me cringe. It made me also remember the name of the company (although I’m not going to post it) … if I ever need my windows replaced (a high possibility in this house), I will be asking the window company what they do with their old windows and how seriously they take their environmental impact as a company.
- The amount of plastic I could see on the landfill floor was just astounding. If there was ever a call to reuse/reduce, this scene was it.
- Many non-commercial dumpers amazed me with their laziness. They brough mixed loads of items, and instead of sorting them out—yard wastes was one stop, recycling was another, reclaimed wood was another, etc.—they just paid more (for greater trash volume) and dumped it all in the landfill pile. I was just dumbfounded to watch people dumping cardboard, tree clippings, grass, and plastic bottles into the landfill pile.
- Why do we make decks out of chemically treated wood? The deck was thoroughly rotten and it wasn’t that old—it could have been any kind of non-treated wood and ended up in the same condition. The difference is that the chemically treated wood has to go into the landfill; the non-treated stuff can be reused in the garden or burned for firewood or reclaimed for wood chips.
- Recycling carts are not recyclable! It was crazy to see so many of them IN the landfill—apparently if they get smashed or otherwise damaged, in the landfill they go. We replaced other containers for recycling with these carts to make collection easier/faster, and in the process we’re creating more trash for the landfill with the carts?
- Even in a dump, some hope remains. I flipped over a piece of the deck while I was dumping it, and found a sweet little banana slug. I didn’t want him to end up in the landfill too, so I carefully plucked him off the deck, put him in my MyCoffee cup, and brought him home to my yard. Even surrounded by trash, I found a way to reuse a cup made of recycled paper, save a beneficial creature, bring him home, and then recycle the cup. (The picture is the slug getting released in my yard.)
