Detritus

Trash is on our minds again these days. According to the local paper, the most distressed parties to the current recycling/trash collection distress in Point Roberts are engaged in a mediation intervention under the guidance of a judge. And the parties would, I think, be Arthur (who is the current possessor of the trash/recycling license), the three P.R. complainants, and the County itself.

Arthur, I think, wants everyone in Pt. Roberts to have to be a part of the trash/recycling service. (Currently, it is dealer’s choice, and not enough of the dealers are choosing to be part of it.) The complainants want the County to take away Arthur’s license to handle the trash/recycling and, further, to award it instead to someone who will provide curbside recycling regardless of the universality of membership in that club. And the County, it would appear, just wishes that the whole thing would go away without its having to alter the ordinance that does not permit requiring everybody to participate monetarily in trash/recycling in rural areas. If the mediation doesn’t lead to something agreeable to the three parties, then the WUTC (the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission) will take the matter in hand later in the spring.

As it happens, we went out to the trash/recycling center (which is called either The Transfer Station or The Dump) to deliver unto it a large quantity of recycling that we had been gathering up over the weeks and months since Arthur’s company had ceased picking it up (on a bi-weekly basis). Plastic bottles, glass, tin cans, paper and cardboard are the stuff of recycling in this venue. I hadn’t been out there for several years and it had changed a lot. I don’t remember, actually, what it used to look like, but I don’t remember it looking like it currently does.

What you have is a large yard with abandoned refrigerators lined up on one side, and dumpsters of various sizes located in the center. You drive up a ramp arrangement and park your car. Then you take your recycling (or whatever you are taking to them) and put it in the appropriate area/container. The recyclables are in one area, and everything else is also in the central area slightly separated from the recycling part. There are signs explaining what goes where and how what is to be rendered before it goes where. The paper goes here, and the cardboard goes there, and the plastic bottles/tin cans/glass containers are dropped over the edge into a large dumpster. The sign says that the plastic bottles must have necks and that the plastic bottles must not have lids and that the plastic bottles must be flattened. The glass containers and the tin cans go in as God made them.

However, as you can see from the photo, the plastic bottles are often not flattened and their lids are still with them, the cardboard is not glass, metal, or plastic and thus is erroneously dumped: here, as in everywhere that humans function, directions are intended only for those who care about directions, a small and tedious bunch of people, one might assume.

More sorrowful than that, though, was the very sight of it all. As with the making of sausage and laws: you’ve got to see it happen before you can really know how much of a fan you want to be of the product. I remember suggesting to people who drink and drive about the advisability of spending a little late evening time in an urban emergency room before they pursue that activity. Just seeing all this stuff, all those refrigerators, all these bottles and cans and things, all this detritus. Not an uplifting sight with respect to the makers of all this after-material.

Two thoughts: (1) It’s not a particularly pleasant experience going to the dump and adding to the mass of material, but maybe that’s a good thing, in that it requires us, just a bit, to see what the dark side of a consumptive life looks like; and (2) It’s not a particularly pleasant experience but, as with pumping my own gasoline, I suppose I could get used to it.