Andy Rooney
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Last Saturday, I filled the trunk of my car and the passenger seats behind me with junk and headed for the dump. There were newspapers, empty cardboard boxes, bags of junk mail, advertising flyers, empty bottles, cans and garbage. I enjoy the trip. Next to buying something new, throwing away something old is the most satisfying experience I know.
The garbagemen come twice a week but they're very fussy. If the garbage is not packaged the way they like it, they won't take it. That's why I make a trip to the dump every Saturday. It's two miles from our house and I often think big thoughts about throwing things away while I'm driving there. (The odors emanating from the bags behind me keep my mind on my payload.)
How much, I got wondering last week, does the whole Earth weigh? New York City alone throws away 24 million pounds of garbage a day. A day! How long will it take us to turn the whole Planet Earth into garbage, throw it away and leave us standing on nothing?
Oil, coal and metal ore are the most obvious extractions, but any place there's a valuable mineral, we dig beneath the surface, take it out and make it into something else. We never put anything back. We disfigure one part of our land by digging something out and another after we use it and throw it away. I say "away," but there's really no such place as "away."
After my visit to the dump, I headed for the supermarket, where I bought $34 worth of groceries. Everything was in something…a can, a box, a bottle, a carton or a bag. When I got to the checkout counter, the cashier separated my cans, boxes, cartons, bottles and bags and put three or four at a time into other bags, boxes or cartons. Whatever came to her hand on the conveyor belt in a bag, she put in another bag. Sometimes she put my paper bags into plastic bags. One bag never seemed to do. If something was in plastic, she put that into paper.
On the way home, I stopped at the dry cleaners. Five of my shirts, which had been laundered, were in a cardboard box. There was a piece of cardboard in the front of each shirt and another cardboard cutout to fit the collar to keep it from getting wrinkled. Clipped to the front of each shirt was a cloth tag that identified the shirt as mine. The suit I had cleaned was on a throwaway hanger, in a plastic bag with a form-fitting piece of paper inside over the shoulders of my suit.
When I got home, I put the groceries where they belonged in various hiding places in the kitchen. With the wastebasket at hand, I threw out all the outer bags and wrappers. By the time I'd unwrapped and stored everything, I'd filled the kitchen wastebasket a second time, already getting ready for next Saturday.
It would be interesting to conduct a serious test to determine what percentage of everything we discard. It must be more than 25 percent. I drank the contents of a bottle of Coke and threw the bottle away. The Coca-Cola Company must pay more for the bottle than for what they put in it. Dozens of things we eat come in containers that weigh more and cost the manufacturer more than what they put in them.
We've gone overboard on packaging in the United States and part of the reason is that a bag, a can or a carton provides a place for the producer to display advertising. The average cereal box looks like a roadside billboard.
The Earth we inhabit could end up as one huge, uninhabitable dump.
You'd see me there Saturday mornings…throwing stuff away.
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