Tag Archives: composting

Desperately Seeking Zero Waste

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Dear Reader may find this loopy, or just annoying. But some of you can relate.

I cannot discard non-biodegradable garbage of any kind. If I go somewhere with no recycling (a Massachusetts nursing home, a Maine hotel), I throw my soda can in the garbage in disgust. Later, I secretly retrieve it, and put it in my car. Can’t help myself. 

Maybe my aversion to throwing things out began with Poverty Mentality, but definitely resourcefulness. As a child, I would decorate my dollhouse with refuse. Inspired perhaps by the TV show “Land of the Giants” – which we would re-enact with our Barbies® – I’d use a toothpaste cap as a dollhouse wastebasket; tiny sea shells as ashtrays (one in every room!); a clear marble as a crystal ball. I fished mini-detritus out of the trash at home, my imagination spinning.

Now, I discuss needless waste occasionally with a similarly obsessed colleague. Yet even she once talked me into throwing out a damaged binder clip. She said, (and it’s not the first time someone has said this to me): “It’s garbage.” I sighed. Okay. But how many mangled binder clips alone litter this earth? Face masks? Fact: plastic grocery bags and sandwich bags take 1,000 years to decompose. There is massive trash on the ocean floor. It is called “marine debris,” and Saturday September 20th is International Coastal Cleanup! Go here to find a coordinator worldwide. 

In my defense, I can discard a tattered sock (after I use it to clean something) or other rubbish no one else in their right mind would want (a scratched CD; half a shoe).

Once I asked an acquaintance about what to do with small pieces of foil. Zero-sort recycling companies typically demand that objects be 2” by 2” at minimum – or they can “break the machine.” The acquaintance suggested rolling the bits into larger pieces of foil, forming a 2 by 2” ball. Which I do to this day. I collect the bits in a jar with glee …
x-treme recycling! Picturing them in landfill makes me go berserk.

I also say, “No flower before its time.” When a vase is starting to croak, I pull only the dying flowers and leave the living. Also with grapes and such. I really push it. And while I won’t eat something that’s “going by” in its raw state, I’ll cook it. Food waste in this world of people literally starving to death is, simply, criminal. Rotting food in landfills produces methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

I won’t knowingly use AI. The (coal-powered?) giant computers required to run it, tons of water as a coolant … no thanks. It’s hard to avoid AI now.

But I’m no saint. I use paper towels. Saran wrap. Toothpaste. Glitter is the enemy of the environment, per my SIL, so I feel terrible when I wear glitter nail polish or vintage clothing with sparkles that fall off. I discard much of the Bloomin’ Onion at the Tunbridge Fair. My favorite commute was at the Comedy Cellar when I walked downstairs and was … at work! My least favorite: Driving to Dartmouth for seven years from central VT. The li’l Stagecoach bus back then killed my back. But the car killed my carbon footprint. For life.

Happily, many Vermonters are lucky, with easy backyard composting (food scraps being banned from our landfills in 2020). At the New World Festival, the dining “plasticware” was wood. Many events have cans marked for Waste, Compost, or Recycling. Love it, if not the reprobates who ignore the signage.

A friend who often has guests saves to-go coffee cups and lids. When you leave, you get a nice, hot coffee for the road. We both re-use paper towels and zip-lock bags. Don’t worry, it doesn’t get more disgusting than that.

People who don’t care about reducing, recycling, reusing, repurposing …. what? Do not all Earthlings care about the horrors of droughts, high-powered storms, heat waves, and sand storms (in Phoenix?!)? Twelve-cylinder vehicles idling with no human in sight: what gives?

A young journalist at work recently brought her lunch salad in a plastic container that originally had food in it from the store. Re-use! I wept. Here’s another weeper.  What great American novel is this quote from? 

“These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall … this lovely world, these precious days.” Submit guesses to ann@ourherald.com. No cheating!

Let’s keep our world lovely, shall we? I close with what a nutter friend once said about the idiocy of importing bottled water from other countries. He said, “Look. Look around! We have plenty of water. Right. Here.” He also had my favorite bumper sticker: “I’m Sorry for Driving so Close in Front of You.” But I digress. Good day.

Ann Aikens’ comical, uplifting book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, is available online and in Vermont shops, the audiobook on Amazon.  She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find more of her writing at uppervalleygirl.com; information at annaikens.com.

Stand Up for Others ~ And Self

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Apex Tech Logo gif One trait is evident in today’s Young People (hereinafter, the “YPs”).  In print at least (meaning, on Facebook), they seem to have more of a grip than we did. Better advised by parents and schools, they understand more which roads to go down—and which not to. We were kind of shooting in the dark, as I recall.  “You must have a liberal arts education!” we were told.  Sadly, I’d have been better off with a welding certificate from Apex Tech.

With their impressive grip, the YPs seem willing to protect and defend what they believe in. In prior generations, people considered it rude to speak up in polite conversation—at, say, a dinner party—regarding, say, marriage outside of one’s race or (specific!) religion.  Really, there’s nothing noble about listening to someone excoriate what you believe in, or (politely!) watching someone catch abuse. The YPs make a stand without being nasty about it.  We can be like them. Just say, “I disagree. Can we change the subject?” Or when it’s unsalvageable: “Hey wow, I forgot have a dental appointment. It starts in 10 minutes, and lasts the rest of my life.”

Sure, it’s uncomfortable to confront people, but as Rudolph the Reindeer’s father (Donder!) notes with a (Yankee?) disdain for self-indulgence, “Some things are more important than comfort. Like self-respect.”  Okay, so he says it regarding a fake nose cap he’s making his son wear to fit in.  I’m using it anyway.

Speaking of Rudolph, I have a friend with that name. He introduced himself to me years ago with, “Rudolph…as in ‘the Red-nosed Reindeer,’” a thrilling and crisp addendum. Ever since, when meeting people I imagine (silently!) what they could say to jazz it up (“White, as in the absence of color”; “Creamer, as in ‘non- dairy’”; “Joseph, as in ‘Jesus, Mary, and…’”; “Lava, as in ‘molten”; “Polly, as in “’…wanna cracker?’”) Let’s face it, in hard tymes, we can use all the laffs we can get. So if you have a name that’s a word in the English language, you might try this out for the benefit of All.

Back to protect/defend: many motorists dig those construction road signs with giant letters, “LET ‘EM WORK ~ LET’ EM LIVE.”  Succinct; clear; a trifle threatening. I’d like shirts saying that for protecting/defending. See someone getting picked on? Wear the shirt and stand around him all day. Hear an employee getting wailed on by an employer or customer? Speak up! Throw the shirt at the perp! Do something. Do it!

I have a post-menopausal acquaintance that looks younger (dammit) than I. There was a guy she liked who seemed interested but wasn’t asking her out. She told her friend that he’d better make his move because, “My clock is ticking.”  Friend’s response?  “Yeah, the big one.”  Not the biological clock, the big clock. The big clock is ticking, people. Don’t tarry. At age 32, another friend started getting cold feet about his relationship. Someone advised him to stay, suggested he was just panicking about giving up his solitary lifestyle. Two decades later, he’s glad he did. So I say if you’re (1) dilly dallying: knock it off and (2) putting up with dallying/dallying: knock it off. Speak up for yourself. Time’s a wastin’.

Now if you’re taking repeated punches from someone, the smart thing is to nip it in the bud. Let your attacker know his or her unkind behavior is being noted and that you are not falling for it—that this is not something you somehow “deserve.”  They’ll move on to other prey and, generally, it’s much more fun sticking up for someone else than for yourself. That’s why god invented bodyguards, wingmen, tailgunners, right-hand women, and riding shotgun. But remember, the pen is mightier than the shotgun.  As is a well-arched eyebrow.

Your monthly good news is that eco-protector/defender Mayor Bloomberg is crusading for New Yorkers to separate their garbage for composting. NYC plans to compost 100,000 tons of food scraps yearly, then build a plant to process this into bio-gas to generate electricity. Frisco and Seattle have already mandated same.  Right on.

I’ll leave you with this quote from John Caruso’s excellent YA novel, Hard Magic:  “They knew from then on… they could depend on each other. That was real. It was one thing to sit around a room and share information and speculate about the truth of things; it was another thing to use what you knew and go out into the world and change things for the better or, at least, keep things from getting worse.”

Get up. Stand up. Don’t give up the fight. Good day.