The Garbage That Ate Our Lives

In the beginning, before our garbage took over our lives, my housemates and I were just trying to be good citizens. In Berkeley, that means recycling.

Now, as officials plot how to increase the number of recyclers to meet the goal of recycling half the city’s solid waste by 1991, I find myself frightened by the specter of recycling gone wild. These officials should study the effects recycling has had on my house.

For the past year, I have lived in a three-story cooperative in this city with nine other people. Some of us are students with part-time jobs; some have recently graduated and are frantically looking for full-time jobs. It seemed the perfect living arrangement: we share cooking, cleaning, shopping, costs, and each other’s company. We were a pretty average household, until we went on our recycling binge.

Our efforts began modestly--in part out of necessity. Nine of us could easily fill five cans a week with trash. To cut back, we began recycling our three biggest problems: paper, which we put in boxes; moldy food, which goes on a huge compost heap in the back yard; and glass jars, former keepers of moldy food.

The list grew as we discovered that recycling was a good cause to which we could all contribute, and we now process a cornucopia of waste products which must be washed, rinsed, de-labeled, crushed, sorted, or boxed, and then taken to the recycler’s.

But as the trash in our assorted bins piles up, so does house tension. One evening I put onion skins in the “scuz bucket,” used for the compost heap, and by next morning an anonymous housemate had posted a list of offal types that were banned from the bucket. Onion skins topped the list, in very large letters. Looks of disdain are now cast when a plastic bag that once held pungent cheese is carelessly tossed into the trash instead of being washed, rinsed, and hung on the line outside to dry.

I recently made the mistake of using a forgotten can of RAID on a battalion of ants conducting maneuvers in the bathroom sink. An emergency house meeting was held that evening to discuss the perils and cruelty of using pesticides. One housemate suggested that instead of killing the ants (which, she says, aren’t so bad to live with) we buy “humane ant traps” of solid plastic for a mere $13 apiece.

Just last week, one of our less dutiful members put an ancient cantaloupe, which had fermented in a plastic bag for months, into a regular garbage can. Someone apparently witnessed this error and righted the wrong. She hauled the ex-cantaloupe out of the “can of last resort,” poured the blue-green goo from the bag into the “scuz bucket,” and then washed and aired the bag. Incidents like these are dividing our house into two orders: the avid and the annoyed.

Bimonthly house meetings have also changed. These used to be a chance for everyone to get together and talk, not only about chores and bills, but about how things were going. Now the meetings have become sessions of dread that last for hours while we discuss what to buy and what not to buy.

We debate endlessly over what constitutes an acceptable purchase, and cover everything from fruits and vegetables (organic, except when unavailable) to cleansers and dish and clothes detergent (biodegradable only). Coffee filters are unbleached and dioxin-free. We don’t buy items in plastic containers if there is a glass alternative--which is no mean feat when even grape jelly comes in squeezable plastic bottles. We usually end up spending two to three times more money for these environmentally safe products.

A sort of product political awareness seems to have sprung out of our increased recycling, and it daily threatens our current list of acceptable purchases. We no longer buy G.E. products since we found out the company makes nuclear weapons, grapes are off the grocery list because of the pesticide danger to migrant workers, and no more Folger’s coffee because the company buys from politically suspect El Salvador. Of course, no “Flipper-killer” tuna is allowed.

Since alternatives usually aren’t easy to get, Saturday shopping forays are now all-day affairs. One of our biggest fears is that we’ll discover bagels exploit someone, somewhere.

What will happen to the citizens of Berkeley if the recycling religion spreads? As it is now, a lot of the conversation in my house revolves around recycling.

I look out the window at the 10 plastic bags drying on the line and wonder whether the time spent was really worth it. Even more, I worry about the human environment all this effort creates. If this keeps up, my housemates and I will be very boring people, having nothing but piles of used containers and testy natures in common.