Step 1. If you don’t hate waste, you should. If you do, here’s what you can do. It’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Go to the waste bin in the kitchen. Step on the little pedal at the bottom. The lid pops up. Look inside. Retrieve a cardboard/plastic item.
A quick aside. Modern packaging is elder abuse because old people can’t open packages without gargantuan effort. They get frustrated, break their nails, which get infected and send them off to urgent care, cut themselves on the sharp edges, get angry and project their bad feelings on each other and whatnot. My cousin has legal chops and a lot of time on his hands because he is lazy. Except when he gets a great idea. His latest greatest great idea is to file a class action suit on behalf of a lot of oldies against the packaging industry for elder abuse. He listens to me, so I told him his idea has legs just to give him something to do, although as anyone in their right mind knows, such a suit has a snowball’s chance in hell of collecting more than two or three senior signatories for various reasons, one of which is that most of them are tanked on meds and hard at work drooling away in depressing elder care facilities. A fortunate few galavant around the world working on their bucket lists.
Setp 2. Separate the plastic from the cardboard. Easier said than done; they are more or less joined at the hip like Siamese twins. Persevere. Set the plastic on the countertop for later and get a sturdy pair of scissors. Cut the cardboard in small strips. Little (the smaller the better) pieces are best.
I don’t want to hear your next thought. You and your hypocritical upper-middle class friends have been kissing the ass of the recycling business for years now. Before you get all huffy and object, take a gander under the kitchen sink at the host of offenders or check out that bottle of blue chemicals next to your toilet seat. Poop smells, get used to it. You’re not really serious about your duty to the world; it’s all for show—those tidy little plastic bags of stuff sitting curbside to shame your slovenly neighbor on the left. No more shaming and virtue signaling. It’s time to earn your chops, get down and dirty and really save the effing planet.
Step 3. Get a plastic bucket and fill it half full of water. We will get to the plastic topic later; it’s more complicated. Actually, since this is the first time you’ve shown even a rudimentary inclination to hold yourself accountable, you need to really rub your snoot in garbage. Think of it as penance. So, empty the whole garbage can and retrieve every bit of cardboard you can find. Slice it, dice it, pulverize it with a sledge hammer if you’re feeling particularly frustrated and aggressive today.
A little philosophy now; you are breaking down the fibers to make it biodegrade more quickly. Cardboard is just trees, plus a large dollop of forever-chemicals. I know; I worked on the plywood side of a pulp mill once during my misspent youth, “scarfing in glue” they called it. If cardboard was flowers, it would be called annuals, not perennials.
Here’s a little aside, just to stoke your outrage a bit. I have a friend who gardens for an obscenely rich couple. Nobody knows how much filthy lucre they have stockpiled. Definitely enough keep a couple of shredders busy around the clock for a few weeks on hundred dollar bills and not feel the pain. They live in a huge Victorian Mansion on a famous lake with plenty of waterfront. It was purloined by their Robber Baron ancestor (think the Elon Musk of the 1880’s) who made the fortune of fortunes in copper from the mines in Butte Montana where my dearly departed father once toiled and where the wonder that is me and the notorious stuntman Evil Knievel hail from. Needless to say, it’s the mother of all superfund sites.
These genteel rich folk (they’re not bad people once you get to know them) feel that the plain over-fertilized grassy lawns favored by the “arrivistes” (read nouveau riche) for their faux Italianate McMansions are “beneath them.” These are direct quotes. “Frankly, I prefer our gardens to the Tuileries,” the grand dame said to my friend.
I don’t know how refined your sense of injustice is, but your outrage meter should glow like a meteor as it hurtles through earth’s atmosphere on its journey to oblivion when I remind you of the billions worldwide who don’t have a pot to piss in, much less decent food, a bottle of blue chemicals to mask the smell of their shit, and a tiny patch of grass on which to park their downtrodden impecunious asses. In any case, said rich couple imports pristine sand—they say cleanliness is next to Godliness— from the beaches of Greenland every year to replace last year’s lotion-soiled sand, although it’s been a good ten years since they sunned their aging bodies on the beach in question or the beach in Saint-Tropez where another one of their spectacular mansions sits idle, the furniture covered with sheets.
And now, the coup de grace! My friend, who manages their gardens, just told me that they spent $25,000 on flowers, all annuals! This means that every lousy plant will be uprooted at the end of the summer and turned into compost.
The point, however, is that while compost is good, it’s better not to waste $25,000 on it since the 2.5 billions of tons organic food waste that is generated worldwide yearly is available for the asking, not to mention non-food organic waste. And the fate of the two-thirds that doesn’t get recycled? It is mixed with every forever chemical imaginable, unceremoniously dumped in landfills far and wide and left for our descendants, who, thanks to the fact that chemical poisoning is a way of life these days, will probably be no longer recognizable as we know ourselves today, having mutated in thalidomidey sort of ways over the millennia into shapes our terrestrial selves can’t begin to conceive. Cheery thought that. Especially cheery for the cohort intent on guaranteeing generational wealth for their pampered offspring with portfolios weighted heavily in favor of Dow, BASF and Sinopec.
Step 4: Add your pile of abused cardboard, sprinkle in a few handfuls of shredded Ben Franklins, and whatever food scraps are available, into the bucket and slosh it all around. Let it soak for a few minutes and get out your mixer. Put it on high and stir the living daylights out of it. You’re almost done with your part.
Step 5. Now head for a patch of dirt nearby. It could be your own backyard if you are lucky enough to own one, or a vacant lot down the block. Lovingly pour your soupy mix on a barren patch and come back in the spring. You will be amazed because you’ve just kick-started the healing process. Little green things all over sticking out eager heads begging for more. Everything loves compost. If you were to take regular ganders at your creation, you would quickly become fascinated and start to love yourself for a good reason. It takes on a life of its own, attracting all sorts of critters and changing in wonderful ways from day to day.
Waste is inevitable. Don’t waste it. I can’t remember where I read it, but there are villages in Subsaharan Africa that are taking back the land from the ever-encroaching dunes with the aid of their own piss. I’m not sure if that included nightsoil. If you can’t figure the meaning of this famous euphemism, google it. In any case, each village has a big vat where people pour their urine every day. They let it stew for three months and apply it to the soil in which they grow their crops. I forget the exact number, but low and behold agricultural output increased about 30%! Humans strike back against evil ever-encroaching nature. Even kids started blackmailing their parents, threatening to withhold their pee if their allowances weren’t increased. Recycling is fun.
Step 6: (Optional). If you really want to do the right thing for your planetary mind, slice, dice, pummel, pound, chop and offer your mental and emotional waste to God (Isvara) as it arises and don’t worry about polluting God. All offered waste is immediately incinerated in the fire of God’s love.
Step 7: Be satisfied that you have done your best. Relax and enjoy.