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
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