7: Waste

Our experiment with the book 7 has gotten a little off track I believe.  This past month was suppose to be about waste.

I read the snippets of the chapter but didn't read her day to day happenings on how she dealt with waste in her home.  After reading the intro to the chapter I realized we do pretty well in this area. God created the Earth and we are to be a good steward of it and I think we do.

We recycle and have for a long time.  We compost and have for a long time.  We use reusable grocery bags and have for a long time.  Some things that I did change though is we use less plastic bags like Ziploc.  And I have even started using more glass storage containers instead of the Tupperware like stuff.  For the most part, we have stopped buying water in plastic bottles and use our big tumblers instead.  I really don't remember much else from the chapter although I am sure there was more.

But, the really neat thing we did, as part of Waste Month, was to tour our local land fill a.k.a. the dump.  It was so informative and I learned a lot of really important stuff about what happens to our garbage.  I learned things that I feel everyone should know who lives in our area.

In our area, the garbage gets taken to a transfer station and then sent to a land fill in another county.  Thirty-four semi truck loads a day.  At first this bothered me that we pay to ship our garbage out of the county.  It can't be cheap.  But, the more she explained the more I understood.  The landfill our garbage goes to is for a region.  And they take the gas, methane, that comes off the garbage and turn it into fuel for thousands of homes in the area.  Not to mention, our county is very densely populated for the most part and no one (including me) wants a landfill in their backyard.

The presenter educated us on reusing as much of our recyclables as possible.  She showed us neat little crafts and gifts and trinkets that can be made with our recyclables.  Much of what we recycle isn't cost effective to do so.  She said glass isn't worth recycling because of the cost but obviously they do it anyway.  Most of it ends up getting ground down and put into concrete.  We got some really great ideas for our market days project that we do every year.

We were able to tour the whole facility.  At the site we were at, the only thing they recycled were Class Three garbage like electronics and such.  We saw the methane gas coming out of its tube.  We  drove by what use to be the landfill, now covered in grass, and I think she said it was going to be a parking lot.

The kids seemed to enjoy the presentation and the tour.  It was time well spent learning about our garbage.  We are taking our recently learned information and putting it to good use . . .