Bags, bags, everywhere!

I realised this morning that, as I'm still figuring out the schematics of this blog, I haven't been able to make the postings that exciting.  Hmm...  Bear with me, here, as I am certain that things will work themselves out over time.  I hope! :)

***

I used to go walking in the woods, and remember coming across interesting things that reminded me that I was not the first person to come this way - a stray beer can or wrapper of some sort - and even old trash piles that someone had started when s/he lived nearby long ago.  I even remember coming across an old Radio Flyer wagon, which was not too worse for wear, and which, after much laughter from my friend Nate Brown, I successfully lugged over hill and dale to my car and took it home.

In fact, in Archaeology, we love old trash piles - it tells us so much about historical people - probably more than they would have liked, although we can't rightly ask them now, can we?

This was sort of the prompting for this week's project - I wanted to limit the waste coming out of our house and going into the landfill.  I remember learning that there are no longer any active landfills in the Chicagoland area - that all of our waste - and what a lot there is - is hauled up to Wisconsin.  What a big mess!

And, frankly, I don't really want people to know that much about me.  We shred important documents, so this is a sort of garbage shredding, I suppose.

Yesterday, Olivia and I got out the Whole Foods bags (which are very useful for sorting recyclables) and started sorting.  We ended up with quite a few:

We have three types of "paper" bags - newsprint, slick/junk mail, and office paper.  There is one bag for metal & glass, but the majority is plastics!  Olivia especially enjoyed finding the little recycle triangle and determining the number nested within.  She would then find the appropriately-labeled bag, and drop the item in.

The fullest bag so far (and by far) is the "?" bag, which has all of those plastics not labeled with a recycling number.  One of them even has a little note which encourages recycling, but no number - hmm...

We've also begun our "compost" bucket, which, in reality, is full of anything that is biodegradable.  In a true compost pile, there would be no meat products, but we've got some bits in there now.  I've also chucked in tissues and paper things that can't be truly recycled - like tea bag packages - the plastic on those can't be composted, but most of the paper can:

Don't look to closely, or you'll see the kale that I bought but neglected to remember to cook until it was too yellow to eat.  Sorry, kale.

So far, our non-biodegradable waste (recycling & the waste bin, which includes everything we can't stick anywhere else) has much more volume than our biodegradable waste.  Which, in a way, is good, as we are wasting less food than we could be.  However, it also brings into focus how much packaging we use.  In thinking back to those rubbish piles I encountered in the woods, I rarely recall seeing plastic yogurt cups or wrappers from 100-calorie packs of cookies.  There were maybe a few broken glass bottles of some sort of tonic and some broken dishes, but not much else.  Of course, this didn't encompass an entire life's rubbish, but my weekly throw-out is much MUCH more than it would have been one hundred or even fifty years ago!

How does this relate to food?  Well, I think I'll talk about that a bit more tomorrow.  I hear little feet.