On my walk home from work, I could not believe the amount of trash laying around my neighborhood following refuse pick up day. This was more than the typical litter the lazy American automobile drivers toss out their windows onto peoples yards and sidewalks. It was like our city’s refuse workers couldn’t be bothered to pick up any trash that escaped their trucks as they pick up the big rolling totes with a hydraulic arm and dump the bins vertically into the truck. It just boggles my mind that American citizens like living in a pile of refuse. Whether it is in the street, their homes, or cars (like some teenagers I know that live in my home.)

No, I’m not perfect as receipts blow out of my car on a windy day. Sometimes it is recycling that escapes from our recycling bin, car, or wherever in the gales of winter. We do make a conscious effort to recycle, keep our car clean of trash, and bag everything carefully. It just seems like everywhere I walk or look there are cigarette packets, boxes, butts, vapes, convenience store food containers, paper plates, plastics of all shapes and sizes from soda/pop bottles, fireball whisky shooters, and even laundry detergent containers. My wife and I have caught several drivers and their passengers dumping trash onto the street with our Go-Pro on our commutes. The police don’t want the hassle of ticket writing despite the evidence. My word, we Americans are SLOBS!!!!

In geocaching we have events called CITOs. It is an acronym for Cache In Trash Out. We get a special event cache for our cache find statistics while socializing with fellow geocachers and in the process we clean up a section of a park or neighborhood. Things I have found during the CITO events include: furniture, tires, a safe (had to call the police,) tools of all sorts and styles, trash listed above, alcohol containers of all kinds, and of course everyone’s favorite…used sharps and birth control devices. Yep, American refuse is top notch trash. The richest slovenly country of all time. It is sad really. Very sad. Ridiculously sad. It is bleeping sad. The safe was the heaviest piece of trash we found. This was at the junction of three waterways (Hennepin Canal, Rock River, and Mississippi River.) Someone just dumped what they stole. The second biggest piece of trash I picked up was a net ball on the Mississippi River Bank. The net ball from commercial fishing on the river weighed about 50 lbs. I had to double bag it to get it to the trash can for the parks department to fetch. Thankfully it did not contain any animal remains.

In 30-60 minutes about ten geocachers can collect well over 100 pounds of refuse. Some days we surpass that with 100 or more kilograms… ha ha the USA still on the antiquated English measurement system. I guess I’m going to have to bring my trash bag, gloves, and grabber with me to clean up the whole neighborhood. I would like some neighbors to help pitch in and just clean up one street front a week. If we don’t it is just going to float or blow into our waterways, and eventually into the ocean. What is so hard about picking up a little trash?

The 4th graders at my school are working on an invention project to promote critical thinking and problem solving regarding various issues they can identify. Their unit came to mind as I was walking home. What can we do as a community, county, state, country, continent, or planet to solve our trash problem at the source. The source of the issue is looking at us in the mirror every morning. We are the problem. We toss our waste recklessly. It mounds up in our refuse containers. It overflows around the holidays. Our individual trash issues become someone else’s problem… Is it fair? Not in the least. Then our cities haul it to the dump. It spills out of the truck on the way to the dump. Face it, some of it never makes it onto the truck. How can we reduce our waste issues and litter issues?

What does one do on a walk? I think. Sometimes I think about thinking and I bog myself down in a quagmire of metacognition, but that’s a different issue. Anyway here were some ideas that came to mind to save space, ease recycling expenses, and limit litter from refuse pick up.

1. Electric shredders on refuse containers for recyclables (paper, plastic, aluminum, and tin)
2. Return to the 12 ounce reusable glass bottles for soft drinks/beer (bottle deposits)
3. Glass products recycled in separate containers for reuse or as material for artistic glass making
4. Recycling centers at communities turn the recyclables into reusable products with the assistance of local manufacturing and food service facilities (Tax credit to replace TIF’s)

It was a short walk, and these are small solutions. Things that have come to mind over the years as I drove thousands of miles to various music jobs over the years include: Digging up landfills and recycling metals, plastics, and glass products. How much steel, iron, aluminum, tin, etc is buried in a landfill? Why dig up the limited basic natural resources from the natural earth? Recycle what was thrown away. Plastics are made of hydrocarbons, and are not biodegradable. Is there a way to make them back into fuel? Or can we turn them into fiber insulation? I’m not a chemist, so how can we reuse rather than make new? Construction waste is a big issue. We are finally recycling the materials for roadways, but what about the waste in the ground? How can we recycle that? Asphalt shingles, aluminum siding, lead piping, (future ammunition?) window glass, and then all of the wood (alternative energy?) Of course there is the hazardous waste that may be in the landfill like asbestos or toxic chemicals that make such an endeavor more difficult. I’m just thinking these things. Are they even plausible? I know this difficult issue to wrangle.

Shifting gears… Instead of giving corporate subsidies for just existing, why not make unfunded mandates to corporations for finding ways to recycle? Just like the unfunded mandates we have to follow in education or at home with auto, health, and home insurance. OK, I’ll be nicer offer grants or tax credits off of profits to do this? I’d rather see Elon Musk invest in this than spending billions of our tax dollars on his neoliberal Space X enterprise. Let’s return space to NASA and he can actually save the planet with that loud murmuring he does everyday in some other way than the Tesla truck.

I’m reminded of a young man back at the turn of the century that made a big splash by cleaning up the banks of the Mississippi River and other waterways. His name is Chad Pregracke. https://www.livinglandsandwaters.org/who-we-are/meet-chad.html I think of his work often. He has actually made trash clean up his life. My question is what can we do to help him and others like him clean up our planet? I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to CITO with or without an event cache on my way home. I might as well, as it will make the walk more interesting. It might make me feel better about this problem.

Please do your part in helping your community. I’m tired of seeing my community and country looking like a refuse pit everywhere I go. I hope you are too… as the world turns….