Good News and Bad News

I read an article someplace yesterday with bad news. It was about trash bags.

The good news here is that Alison and I are great about separating -- and reducing -- our garbage. Minimizing what you throw away is cheaper, it's better for the world, and it's just the right thing to do. So, at the moment, we separate out all of our glass, cardboard, paper, plastic, and aluminum. We also compost all of our food wastes. The composting probably makes the biggest impact: every avocado pit, banana peel, and apple core that would go to the dump now decomposes in our compost bin with our grass clippings (don't worry, we make strides to shrink our lawn every year!), leaves, shredded paper, and ashes and helps turn our garden into a fertile place for stuff to grow.

Here's the bad news. The article was about reusable trash bags. As I read, I thought about the trash I do bring to the dump. A small trash bag full probably every other week, I throw it in the dumpster before I drop the much larger crate of recycling stuff in the recycling dumpster. But I know where this is going. Soon I'll be emptying out my reusable trash bag and I'll be left with disgusting trash guck and juice which I'll have to wash out when I get home. Yuck.

Doing the right thing can be messy. And a pain. But we still do it.