Recycling or not... Cow farts!

SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010


Recycling or not... Cow farts!

Our city requires all yard waste except limbs and branches be put in huge plastic garbage bags. These bags are then stored at the curb waiting for the monthly collection. Limbs and branches are to be cut into lengths less than six feet and bundled.

Are your neighbors following the law and putting their grass clippings and leaves by the curb in large plastic bags so they can more easily be recycled? On the third Thursday of each month, a big diesel truck with a hydraulic claw arm drives around grasping these things and lifting them high in the air to drop them into the accompanying fleet of dump trucks. Usually, the bags of grass clippings and leaves are ripped open in the process. The contents and plastic bags then blow around the neighborhood for days.

I don’t understand why yard waste needs to be put in plastic containers that go to the landfill even if the contents do get recycled. In these same curbside collection locations are usually old tires, refrigerators and unimaginable things that the city has no facility to recycle. A lot of this stuff should go to a hazardous waste collection site.

People at the recycling and transfer facility attempt to sort out the recyclable from the just plain old trash once the trucks dump their loads. Huge front end loaders shuffle around like a herd of cockroaches shoving the recyclable things and the trash into piles of like stuff. Some of that goes to make compost. A lot of it is simply reloaded into bigger dump trucks for a trip to the not so local landfill.

I am afraid that a lot of what should get recycled is now ending up in the landfill while a lot of what shouldn’t be in the curbside pile to start with is mixed in and ends up being ground up and composted. Things like car batteries.

I am big fan of recycling. I am quite disappointed to find out how many things that should or could be recycled are not. Many municipalities, although still collecting recycling, instead of sorting all of the materials are simply sending everything straight to the landfill.

I miss those days of jumping in leaf piles. I miss smelling leaves burning at the curb on a fall afternoon.

I have to wonder if burning the leaves makes a bigger carbon footprint than all the fuel that goes into the collection trucks and that which gets burned by the front end loaders sorting the mess out. Then of course there is the fuel that is burned getting the mess from the transfer facility to the landfill. And, don’t forget the huge front end loaders and excavators at the landfill that are digging the gigantic holes in the earth and shoving this crap into them. These pits are lined with huge plastic tarps and usually covered with plastic and then dirt.

Methane from herds of cows is considered by some a problem adding to global warming. If the methane generated from the landfills is not burned off is it not also adding to global warming?

I can’t figure out which smells worse: lots of really smelly cow farts or a landfill.
Thank goodness our landfill is not in our county. Our neighboring more rural counties with lots of cows decided that the money for burying our trash makes the smell of rotting garbage more pleasant.

Nope, it’s the landfill. And recycling compost in non-recyclable plastic bags... Cow Farts!