One of the least pleasant parts of our move was a mandatory trip to the landfill. (We didn’t have enough room on Ryan’s trailer, so we had to dump the trash in his Dad’s before we could load our boxes.) YUCK! This was not just stinky, but an all-out disgusting experience.

We drove up on top of the mountain (literally) of trash to wait in line behind other trucks dumping garbage. The person right before us dumped the remains of last week’s yard sale (an old green recliner, a vacuum, a huge wooden sign), while a trucker used a 2×4 to scrape goop out of his truck. Trash blew everywhere–cardboard boxes, plastic milk bottles, scraps of paper. And, while bemoaning the smell and the waste, we threw our own scraps of wood and bags of moving trash over the sides of the trailer.

Most of the trash we saw blowing around could have been recycled. Staring at the mountains of trash really brought home the reality of waste disposal. As a consumer society, we have way too much trash. If we ate natural foods, we’d cut down on packaging waste. Recycling reduced our trash by at least half. The new compostable plastics (sun chips bags are compostable now) are great, but we can do more. Ryan & I talked about composting for several years, but we never did it. Dumposaurus – Austin dumpster rental prices and sizes are affordable and suitable in this place.

I think that we like to throw our trash away, happily leaving it up to the garbage man to make it ‘disappear’ like the “Vapoorize” product in Envy. But, as the people in the movie said–it has to go somewhere! All that trash goes somewhere–to create huge mountains made of trash. Seeing it in person makes us want to reduce the amount of trash produced by our family.