[Eco] Don't take out the trash!

[Luisa]

TV Tom, I am totally with 'Becca on this one,

I also do not take the trash out until collection day. And 
some times I even miss collection day and it is no big deal 
to wait another week. We are only 2 people living in our 
house, though. So I do not consider it a big feat (perhaps a 
little one).

We just do not produce that much trash because we compost, we 
recycle and we are mostly vegetarian. I love it! I do not 
feel like I am making any sacrifice, on the contrary, I 
derive pleasure from it.

'Becca, we could start another conversation on cloth diapers 
and washing machines... I want more details, please?

Luisa


--On 2/17/07 11:21 PM -0500 Rebecca Stallings 
<becca at wunderland.com> wrote:

>  >Voluntary masochism sounds rather insane to me.  Life
>  >is filled with enough unpleasantness and suffering as it
> is.
>
> The thing is, where environmental lifestyle changes are
> concerned, over and over again I've found that the thing
> that seems like a sacrifice very quickly proves to be far
> superior to what it replaced.  Taking out the trash only
> once a week saves a lot of time, and reducing the amount of
> trash means taking it out is easier when you do do it.  I
> don't miss most of those disposable things I used to use
> because the reusable alternatives are so much nicer: they
> work better, they feel better, they make me feel like I
> have an established home with all the things I need instead
> of some kind of temporary situation in which everything
> around me is so flimsy it gets ruined in a single use.
>
>  >You sound Catholic!
>
> I'm Episcopalian.  I do not believe that suffering just for
> the sake of suffering accomplishes anything.  I believe
> that very often things that seem inconvenient are in fact
> opportunities to gain meaning and pleasure from life and to
> improve one's soul.  For example:
>
>  >I think taking fun-looking cloth bags to the store
> instead of wasting
>  >the plastic and paper ones is a pleasant alternative, and
> can be a form
>  >of self-expression, like wearing a cool hat!
>
> You find fun, pleasure, and coolness in that experience.
> But you could have refused to try it, arguing, "I'd have to
> remember to take the bags with me when I leave the house!
> I'd have to wash them every few months!   Somebody might
> look at me funny!  It would be a big hassle!"  I often hear
> people say they can't do X to help the environment because
> it would be too much suffering, when they haven't tried it.
>
> Granted, living with a week's worth of your own garbage is
> a more "extreme" thing to do than using real bags for
> shopping.  But honestly, if it is really so unpleasant,
> perhaps you should give some thought to why it is that you
> produce such disgusting stuff.
>
>  >> The first effect of this was to motivate us to start a
> compost heap so
>  >> that the vegetable scraps (which were attracting
> fruitflies) ...
>  >>
>  >I'm so glad I don't have anyone like this as a housemate!
>
> What, someone who eats vegetables?
>
> We didn't already own an outdoor trashcan, so the question
> was, should we get one?  The first objection raised was
> that we also didn't own a car, so if we were going to get a
> trashcan, somebody would have to buy one at the hardware
> store down the hill and drag it up the hill, and also it
> would cost money.  The second was that, living in a
> rowhouse, we'd have to put the trashcan either on our front
> porch or in our small back yard, but both of those were
> places we wanted to hang out, and a trashcan would be ugly
> and smelly.  Somebody would have to wash it out
> periodically, which sounded like just the kind of chore
> that everyone thinks someone else should do, a likely
> source of household strife.  Was there another way we could
> prevent fruitflies?  Well, the trick was to put food scraps
> somewhere other than the open trashcan.  We could seal them
> up in an empty milk carton, but we didn't drink milk in a
> volume equal to our food scraps.  Thus, we agreed upon the
> solution of putting meat and dairy scraps in a milk carton
> and making a compost heap for everything else.  Taking out
> the compost was way easier than taking out the trash.  We
> very rarely had trouble with bugs around our compost heap,
> and when we did it was easily resolved by shoveling
> whatever was attracting them (usually melon seeds) into the
> middle of the pile.
>
> If you already have a trashcan and an unobjectionable place
> for it, then it can be hard to understand where we were
> coming from.  That's why I went to the trouble of typing
> this out: I lived the first half of my life in a very
> different kind of place than I've lived since, and I'm very
> aware of how much easier a wasteful lifestyle was when my
> surroundings made it seem normal and necessary.
> 		---'Becca
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