Trash then and now

Grampa Don

Grampa Don

Yep, that's me
Location
Orange county, Calif.
I was rolling out our trash containers the other day and thought about how different it is from when I was a kid. For one thing, there’s a lot more of it.

Paper and cardboard were burned in our back yard incinerator. That was my chore. That’s not legal here anymore, and our air is better for it. Wet garbage went out in a metal 5 gallon bucket with a lid. It was always full of maggots. A special truck picked it up for hog feed.

Plastic? What plastic? Food came in cardboard boxes, paper sacks, glass bottles or tin cans. It was all recyclable, but probably wasn’t. There was plenty of room at the dump.

I can’t remember what we did with large items. I don’t think there was much of that. Things seemed to last longer then. We may have taken them to the dump ourselves. That was fun because you could find neat stuff to bring home. Now our landfill doesn’t allow that.

I’m also not sure about our green waste; stuff like lawn clippings and prunings. The back of our lot was kind of wild and maybe we piled it back there to rot.

So now I have three big rolling containers supplied by the city, one black for trash, one green for recyclables, and one brown for green waste. The trash goes directly to the landfill, the recyclables go to a sorting center where easy stuff is pulled off and the rest also goes to the landfill, and state law says the green waste has to be composted.

I take chemicals or anything electronic to a hazardous waste drop off yard. I don’t know what they do with it. They used to have a sign saying that you could browse for stuff that’s usable. I haven’t seen that sign recently.

There are hills near us. The landfill used to be a canyon. Now it’s one of the hills. It’s all very mechanized. They even extract natural gas from buried layers. Maybe some day it will be a park, or maybe more houses so there will be even more waste to bury.

Don
 

Grampa Don said:
I’m also not sure about our green waste; stuff like lawn clippings and prunings. The back of our lot was kind of wild and maybe we piled it back there to rot.
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Ours became compost

I raised volunteer tomatoes that sprung up from our compost pile one year
At 8 years old, I was rather proud of that.....and quite amazed that sorta thing could happen
 
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Yeah, I remember this small bucket thing buried in the back yard. We put our table scarps in there. And just when there were millions of maggots, crawling around in there, a grubby looking guy would come and take it away- supposedly to feed the pigs.
Does anybody really know if they fed that stuff to pigs?
I found out how expensive live stalk is. I don't know if I would feed my expensive pigs that rotting food.
 

In the 50's we had a compost pile for the garden, we burned a lot and brush and grass clippings were thrown in an empty lot bordering our backyard.. Recycling was unheard of except for picking though the ashes for coal that didn't burn up the first time around. Even with the small amount of tin cans and meat scraps our little metal garbage can was rarely full. Today I pass cans so full the lid won't stay down.
Gary reminded me of the great corn and pumpkins my grandpa grew in the ash piles he dumped during the winter.
 
Back when I was just a boy, we used to have one day a year (Spring cleaning) where you could put anything you wanted out at the curb and the city would come by and pick it up. As a kid this was a gold mine, as we'd wander the streets picking up items for our forts, etc. I came home once with the front fender of a motorcycle, thinking in time I would collect all the pieces needed to build a complete motorcycle. My dad took one look at it, shook his head - gave me "The Look" and told me to throw it on our trash pile.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
Yeah, I remember this small bucket thing buried in the back yard. We put our table scarps in there. And just when there were millions of maggots, crawling around in there, a grubby looking guy would come and take it away- supposedly to feed the pigs.
Does anybody really know if they fed that stuff to pigs?
I found out how expensive live stalk is. I don't know if I would feed my expensive pigs that rotting food.
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There was a TV show called Dirty Jobs, with Mike Rowe. One episode was about a guy who actually collected garbage and fed it to his pigs. It was some nasty looking stuff, but apparently pigs will eat about anything.

Don
 
Back when I was a kid, we had trash pickup twice a week and wet garbage once per week. We called the wet garbage slop, so my job was to make sure the garbage was out to the curb on pickup days. My dad had me clean out the slop can once per month. I hated that job. It made me about half sick. Then, when we moved into the new home, we had a garbage disposal. I thought that was really neat.
 
When I was young we lived in an apartment building, if I recall, our trash went into paper bags from the supermarket and one of us kids carried it down two flights of stairs and put it in metal covered trash cans to be picked up whenever. For some years we rented a small bungalow for summer vacation, that was more fun. We had a large covered metal trash can that came with the bungalow, we lined it with newspapers and put our trash in there. When we were ready, my father would take me and sometimes my brother to the dumps to dump it out so they could burn it. I loved going there with him, there was always lots of seagulls looking for scraps and filling their bellies....ah, the good ol' days, simple pleasures.
 
Ruth n Jersey said:
In the 50's we had a compost pile for the garden, we burned a lot and brush and grass clippings were thrown in an empty lot bordering our backyard.. Recycling was unheard of except for picking though the ashes for coal that didn't burn up the first time around. Even with the small amount of tin cans and meat scraps our little metal garbage can was rarely full. Today I pass cans so full the lid won't stay down.
Gary reminded me of the great corn and pumpkins my grandpa grew in the ash piles he dumped during the winter.
Click to expand...

My donkey Jezebel grew herself a nice little pumpkin patch a couple of years ago. We fed her some Sugar Pie pumpkins that I let sit too long and the following summer,voila`!
 
Our trash is picked up weekly. We have one or two tall kitchen can bags, plus a little miscellaneous. But our recycle bin! The city picks that up every other week, and it is full to the brim.
 

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