living lightly

I don't know if I mentioned that hobbitt and I have decided, for the time being anyway, not to contract with a garbage pickup company. We've never made much trash in the first place, what with obsessive recycling and composting. It's cheaper here than it was in NJ, but still....

Now I've got my own express lane at the recycling center, which is also where the dump and composting center is. But until we start working on putting up the wall art, I'm pretty much done with the cardboard and packing paper for the moment. I've certainly got a few carloads of nettles to get over to the compost heap there. But as for garbage, well, I'm not anxious to go. First of all, the aroma under the roof there at the transfer station is formidable. Second, it costs a whopping $4.95 just to go over the scales. (We only had a couple of bags of trash the first time we went and didn't have enough weight to need to pay more than the minimum. The cost is $110/ton, which is what, $.055/pound?)

But mostly I don't want to go because it forces me to see the truth about how much trash we make. I mean the collective we, of course, and not exempting hobbitt and me. It's sobering. It's senseless. It's shameful.

And I think that's a useful thing for us. We've never been particularly wasteful, but having to take our own garbage to the dump will pretty much guarantee that we won't be frivolous ever again.