When sorting through trash and recycling at home, I feel a responsibility to identify recyclable and non recyclable items and categorize them accordingly. In reality, I don’t know much about what happens to these waste items after they are picked up, and I don’t  know how effective recycling even is at mitigating environmental damage. I guess I assume that once the trash and recycling is picked up, the trash will find its way to a landfill and the recycling will be repurposed and “recycled” into new products. I’ve heard that in some places, even entire states, recycling may not be recycled at all. When I lived in AZ, my apartment had recycling bins, which I used, but I heard from multiple people that it all ended up being funneled into the same landfills. I never bothered to fact check this, but I guess I thought that the second the trash was picked up, the matter was out of my hands and it was no longer my responsibility. I couldn’t control where it went, so I didn’t bother thinking about it that much. It’s odd, because I guess I sort of assume- and I think a lot of other people do too- that doing a good job of sorting and categorizing household waste is a decent stand-in for reducing the amount of waste produced in the first place, and that by doing that, I am doing my part. I know logically that this is not the case.

I have never really thought twice about the nature of the work of the people who deal with our trash. Stating it like that, it doesn’t sound good, but I have hardly ever seen or interacted with the waste workers who have picked up my trash. I put the trash out, and then, at some point, it is picked up. The next week I do it again. It’s just a routine that is sort of second nature and I’ve never thought deeply about it. I imagine that it is difficult work, physically hard, smelly, potentially pretty draining. When I was a little kid I did a tour of an incinerator- I honestly can’t remember the circumstance- but I do remember it was very very loud. Working in a place like that, I’d imagine you’d need good ear protection in order to not do permanent damage to your hearing.  It doesn’t seem like glamourous work, although it is very important in our modern world, and these workers are part of the backbone of society. If nobody was doing these jobs, our world would probably be a complete mess. Even so, we need to focus as a society a lot more on reduction of waste, and that is all of our responsibility, along with companies and corporations that are producing our products and marketing them to us.