Mattress Pad

Day 169: Mattress Pad

This mattress pad is on a par with Harpo's girlfriend: so nasty I can't tolerate the embarrassment of sending it off to the ragpickers. It went straight to the trash, and then onward to the landfill. 

I have a question: are landfills really so bad? I understand that in this country, they begin with an impermeable layer that prevents pollutants from entering the ecosystem. This is a stark contrast to Belize, which we visited a year and a half ago. The landfill - say, dump - was between the little house we rented and the town on Caye Caulker. People were dumping trash everywhere in the vicinity, and when it rained, puddles would fill with bits of refuse. Every couple days, there would be a terrible stench of burning rubber as the garbage was incinerated. 

Meanwhile, we denizens of the good old USA are increasing our recycling and composting efforts here in our local communities. But many recycling processes result in as much environmental harm as production from raw materials would. And high quality processed compost is piling up in the compost center, because a lot of people would rather buy plastic bags of wood chips and topsoil than shovel compost at the reuse center. 

We order Calder Dairy milk delivered to our door every two weeks, five half gallon glass bottles that the Dairy collects, washes and reuses. We've been doing this for five years, which means we've kept 500 plastic or waxed milk jugs entirely out of the waste stream. If I had a cow, I wouldn't even incur the fuel costs of milk delivery. I could just drink right from the teat. 

Well, that's not going to happen, of course. But while Belizeans may not do as well with waste disposal as we do, they produce significantly less waste per person. And using less - not disposing of things better - is really the key to environmental stewardship. 

Yeah. Milk right from the teat. No recycling necessary.