Charity’s column: Solid waste is solid gone
Oh, how I love to click on the tiny “Trash” icon on my desktop.
I like the crunching noise the computer makes as that virtual can is emptied, the satisfaction of taking what I don’t want and throwing it away. But getting rid of virtual garbage is different from throwing away actual trash. In the real world, there is no “away.”
Folks have been throwing things away on Shelter Island for thousands of years, but in the last hundred or so, we’ve really outdone ourselves. Not only do we generate more trash than ever before, but the stuff we throw away is less biodegradable — I’m thinking of you, plastic bag — and more likely to pollute than the arrowheads, scallop shells and broken crockery of yesteryear.
In the early part of the 20th Century, the illusion of an “away,” where things could be thrown, was widely shared. With plenty of unbuilt land, garbage ended up in the woods, or even in Long Island Sound, and nobody thought anything of it.
Fred Ogar, 84, was a garbage man on Shelter Island for a good part of the last century and remembers the days when the town dump did not have exclusive dominion over home refuse.
“Before I started, a lot of people had their own private dump in their backyard,” Fred said.
The town dump in those days was a simple affair compared to the current operation. Fred recalls: “One guy on duty with a pitchfork or rake, and he would take care of it.”
In those days much of the garbage in backyard dumps, as well as the town dump, got burned.
Fred was a recycler from way back. His extensive, lovingly-restored collection of antique cars and trucks are housed in a museum he created in a barnlike structure on his property. He came by much of his collection while making the rounds.
“I was in the garbage business here on the Island for 41 years, so I collected a lot of stuff,” he said.
In the mid-60s the backyard bonfires and the burning at the town dump ended when New York State banned the burning of garbage because it was unhealthy.
The next three decades were the landfill era, and Shelter Island had its own — an enormous pit near the Center, which was eventually capped when the state banned active landfills.
We now live in the time of recycling, with a “pay-to-throw” system that encourages reusing and composting to avoid the expense of town bags for anything not recyclable.
Today garbage has an aftermarket. These days some of what we want to get rid of, somebody will pay for, and over at the town’s Recycling Center, they follow the markets for corrugated cardboard and #1 plastic like commodities traders follow the price of pork bellies.
When Jay Card Jr. was in charge of things at the Recycling Center, he oversaw the purchase of a horizontal grinder to make woodchips out of the brush and fallen trees that come by the truckload when houses are built, land cleared, and after storms.
At the time, he estimated the town was spending about $100,000 for someone to come take all those limbs away after every major storm. Now Shelter Island mulch is one of the few agricultural products produced locally, putting it in the same category as Sylvester Manor eggs and Island Craft Brewery’s 114 Double IPA.
It’s done wonders for my fig tree.
The woodchipper was part of the town’s larger effort to reduce the trash we have to pay someone to take away, relative to the trash someone is willing to buy.
Today, according to acting Highway Supervisor Brian Sherman, 90 percent of the garbage in the “pay-to-throw” town bag I heave into the dumpster at the end of the weekend goes to an incinerator in Hempstead.
The expense, the inconvenience, the guilty feeling that I may have put a greasy pizza box in the cardboard recycling, make me nostalgic for the virtual trash can on my computer — a place where no category of trash is refused, where I can empty the can as often as I like, where my batteries won’t leak into the aquifer, and where the compost never goes anaerobic.
In the real world, I’ll do what I can to make as little as I can, and keep turning the compost pile.
