Save Your Trash

Just as I was mourn­ing the waste cre­ated by our sea­sonal gift giv­ing and receiv­ing and my own increased impact dur­ing vis­its to homes that don’t recy­cle or com­post I was for­warded a link to a story about a man who saved his trash for an entire year.

I was inspired, so I now have a stash of recy­cling to bring home from our hol­i­day trav­els in my suit­case just as Ari Derfel brought home his 16 pounds of trash from Hawaii.

Becoming a par­ent has had a huge impact of my mate­r­ial foot­print. Convenience is tempt­ing when you add jug­gling a kid (or two or more) to your life, and I choose it more often than I’d like — some­times it is in the form of dis­pos­able dia­pers, other times it is in choos­ing a prepack­aged food, or dri­ving some­where instead of walk­ing. I try to walk a line that allows me to rec­on­cile my ide­al­ism and inten­tions with cul­tural norms and real­ity, but the idea of sav­ing one’s trash for a year is hum­bling. It reminds me that I prob­a­bly err on the side of prac­ti­cal mod­er­a­tion more often than I suc­ceed in mod­el­ing true eco­log­i­cal respon­si­bil­ity (what­ever that is!).

Our roles as par­ents bind us to the next gen­er­a­tion though, and they will be left shar­ing this earth with the trash our gen­er­a­tion cre­ates — includ­ing all those dirty dia­pers we are chang­ing. I’m not advo­cat­ing that any­one actu­ally save the dirty dia­pers, but the idea sure makes a strong case for con­sid­er­ing alter­na­tives like cloth dia­pers, elim­i­na­tion com­mu­ni­ca­tion, or g-diapers. If you have been con­sid­er­ing try­ing one of these it’s not too late to make it a New Year’s resolution…