One Man's Trash

Last Saturday I volunteered to help with the Elsmere cleanup day, picking up the bulk trash that people discarded from their homes. It was a chance to get some exercise outdoors, chat with neighbors and be judgmental about what people threw away.

A few houses were getting rid of books. I don’t like that. Take them to Goodwill or the library but don’t just leave them on the curb. It was a lot of romance novels and stuff so it was nothing I wanted to rescue. It’s just so wasteful to throw away books.

There was a perfectly good armchair that someone threw away. I would have claimed it but we’re trying to travel lighter in anticipation of our move. People also got rid of clothes that they could have just donated.

Some people just left their trash out. Just regular trash that they could have put out on Thursdays with, like, the regular trash. Have they been holding onto a bunch of crap in anticipation of the annual cleanup? People also left their recycling for us to pick up. One house put out a dozen large bottles of Tide. Unless they were doing industrial levels of laundry, these were the type of Tide bottles that would last months each. Every house in Elsmere gets a trash can and recycling can for free so I don’t know why people don’t use them.

Then there were the saddest sights of all: Discarded plastic children’s toys, like little play houses and oven sets. They will stay in a landfill until the last person on Earth is long gone.

We did find a picnic table for the garden, so that’s a plus.