Environmentally Sensible?

Well, that's progress for you. My municipality is putting its organics composting program where its pledge is. In the interests of reducing the amount of garbage put into landfill sites. We're producing so much garbage of every conceivable kind that we're spacing ourselves out of dump-space. On the other hand, there must be an awful lot of people, like us, who do our own recycling of kitchen waste. We've got two composters on the go, and the amount of wet or kitchen waste that we dispose of outside the composters is absolutely minimal.

We eat very little meat, so there is a scarce quantity of bones and gristle to be tossed into the garbage. All of our vegetable and fruit skins and cereal-type scraps make their way into the compost bin we keep handy under the sink. Add to that coffee grounds and teabags, eggshells and any compostable food leftovers. That under-the-counter compost bin gets taken out and dumped into one of our two backyard composters twice each week.

At the end of the gardening season the contents one of the composters get distributed into our gardens, fulfilling the life-cycle of the compost. This is an ongoing process, one that benefits us personally, and the municipality as well, since it results in far less garbage being taken away from this house. On the other hand, we still have far more trash than we should, on a weekly garbage-day pick-up, to be hauled away from our house.

Much of that trash is mostly comprised of packaging materials. If society were truly invested in producing less trash, we would engage in persuading manufacturers and packagers of food products to use fewer packaging materials, and to produce such materials more amenable to composting. And the municipality itself would make far more of an effort to recycle far more waste products from packaging than it currently does.

The green waste bins that the municipality is preparing to circulate among the homes it services will not be an effective diversion of wet waste to the extent that recycling more packaging materials would be. People who already recycle kitchen waste and garden waste to their home composters will have little use of the green bins. Whereas, if there was a commitment to recycle more packaging materials there would be far more of an environmental impact.

The push for green environmentalism helps local industries, those who manufacture the green bins, and the accompanying kitchen catchers, but the total functionality is illusory. All plastics used in packaging should be biodegradable, and they should be disposable environmentally.