A FEW ANECDOTES ABOUT GARBAGE
By Rosa Telegus
Lunch was a catered buffet served in the boardroom of the Comox Valley Regional District office in Courtenay. This was the time Lindsay chose to dump three large black plastic bags of garbage on the floor in front of us – us being the Regional Solid Waste Advisory Committee. Lindsay is not a homeless gal. She is a CVRD outreach person and was with stunning flair making a point. She spent the next ten minutes while we chomped through roast potatoes and chicken and a Greek salad sorting the garbage that she and her crew had collected around Courtenay. The bags contained mostly recyclables and compost, and not much actual garbage that should be buried in a landfill.
Smell? It’s those organics, coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, and trashed desserts that smell, the methane generators. Or, let’s call them the climate changers. However, luckily there were no disposable diapers in those bags that Lindsay brought in. If there had been, the room would have emptied.
Back on Denman – a dutiful unknown Denmanite, or perhaps it was a visitor not knowing where to take it, recently dropped off a bag of garbage at the Recycling Centre – after hours. Garbage, not recycling, containing a used disposable diaper. Horrible for our Recycling Centre workers. But: diapers – a favourite food of bears! Bear candy! I have seen bits of diapers, cleaned of their contents, hanging off trees around dumps. Us Ministry of Environment inspectors could recognize the smell for miles away.
“Bear,” we’d say as we drove in.
Watching Lindsay go through those bags of garbage reminded me of my days at MOE in Kamloops where, in addition to bears, illegal garbage dumping was a problem. We would go through bags of garbage looking for what? Not recyclables but envelopes or bills with names and addresses and phone numbers. Amazingly, this always worked to lead us to who dumped the garbage.
And now to Comox: I have a ninety-nine year old friend, Ann, who continues to compost.
“Every morning I eat an orange,” she told me. “Then I snip up the peel and put it around my peach tree.” Her lovely peach tree is abundant with ripe fuzzy peaches in late summer. “Enough to fill my freezer and last the whole year,” Ann continues. “Perhaps the oil from the orange peel does the trick?” I reply.
I prefer to dwell on the glee I see on Ann’s face as she shows me the earth around her peach tree, bright orange with snipped peel.
“Yes, I get it,” I say, meaning her attitude, I guess, and her care and thought about where her orange peels go. This could be the secret to a long life!
