Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman’s Trashy Journey to Zero Waste
By Eve O. Schaub
Skyhorse Publishing
Can mankind live without garbage? One woman, Eve O. Schaub, set out to find out and learned a lot along the way. If we can’t live without garbage, can we at least cut back? Yes, we can. One obvious point is to ask yourself, when you buy something, whether you really need the item or is it just destined to become garbage? In those cases where you really do need it, what kind of packaging is wrapped around it? Are there better options? Unless you are a pathological pack rat, most of that packaging is of no use to you.
So, what can be recycled? The whole recycling question takes us down quite the rabbit hole. Things like glass, metal and paper products can be recycled. Food scraps can be composted. Many experts have specific recommendations about which food scraps can be composted and which cannot or should not be. My wife and I compost all food scraps and that seems to work. Apparently, Chinese who recycle do the same. I’m sure there are experts doing nuclear face-palms right now, but they’ll get over it.
One thing almost everyone needs to buy is food. However, many products, especially food, come encased in plastic. Since the invention of plastic, we have generated an enormous amount of it. Before the introduction to Year of No Garbage, Schaub provides a page titled “Ten Statistics to Be Horrified By.” Number six says we have produced eight billion metric tons of plastic in our history. It also says that is the equivalent of one hundred times the mass of the moon. That comparison set off some alarm bells in the back of my head, and the nerd in me just had to check.
Schaub gives a source for the size of the moon, and the cited source gives the moon mass as 7.3477×1022 Kgs or 73.5 million metric tons. My alarm bells were still going off, so I checked four other sources: NASA, Wikipedia, space. com and Britannica. They all agree that the mass of the moon is really 7.3477×1022 Kgs (10 to the 22nd power, not 1022). In other words, the superscript got lost. That may not visually look like a big difference, but mathematically, we are talking about a difference of 10 to the 18th power. If I haven’t slipped any decimal places (which is very possible), the name for that number is one quintillion, or one metric crapload (MCL). Another alternative term would be abbreviated as MSL, but let’s move on. The bottom line is, at current rates, we are thousands of years away from producing a wad of plastic that rivals the size of the moon. Many of you are probably in a math coma by now, but I thought this was an interesting exercise in how information can get boogered up. I don’t really blame Schaub, who correctly quoted her source—but the source was wrong. Nevertheless, the basic and correct point is that we have produced a lot of plastic.
Can we recycle it? Sigh; the short answer is no. But you’ve been told by your recycling companies that they can recycle number one and two plastic, and so on. Well, there is a lot of fine print behind all that. If you think they can insert a number two plastic container into a machine, and a new, usable piece of plastic magically comes out the other end. . . um, no. Not without inserting some new plastic into the process—and that process works one time at best, and then you are done. That plastic cannot be recycled again. Plastic does not completely break down (unless you consider microplastics broken down); current recycling simply delays the final outcome.
Then we learn that many paper products are not really entirely paper. They have been sneaking plastic into things like, for example, toilet paper. As we have learned, even if that plastic is number two, it doesn’t really recycle. You can order toilet paper that doesn’t have that problem but, depending on where you are, it may be shipped thousands of miles. The environmental impact of the shipping makes the benefit of that enterprise dubious at best.
This brings us to TP alternatives like the bidet. Schaub invested in a top-of-the-line Biobidet, which fits on your commode in place of the original seat. It came with heated seat, heated water and multiple settings for all those features. The water stream can be low, medium or who needs an enema? It even comes with a remote. Her model included an automatic lid opening feature she found slightly creepy. I can tell you from personal experience that the lid weighs almost nothing and making it automatic betrays a level of laziness that boggles the mind. Any culture that values this option is really circling the drain.
Schaub learned that if she even sneezes too loud in the next room, the lid will open. This bidet, of course, is made of plastic, but at least it is not a single-use, throwaway item. My wife decided years ago that we needed a bidet, and so we have a Biobidet also, but not with the “potty poltergeist” option. I wasn’t sure I would make friends with this thing at first, but in hindsight, I have come to like it. By the way, if you can correctly count the number of puns in this review, you may win a prize. To collect, just call 1-800-FOOLED-U.
Both Schaub and I have learned that no matter how many MCLs that bidet blasts out of your butt, you may still need some toilet paper in the end. So, bottom line, can the normal domestic American go for one year without leaving any garbage behind? The short answer again is no. As Schaub puts it, quitting garbage is like quitting alcohol when you’re trapped in a bar. After removing the garbage can from the kitchen for one year, her household was forced to return what they sometimes refer to as the “bin of shame.” That may not sound like the happiest ending, but the book is written in a very entertaining style and the thumb is UP.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2023
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