Green Waste Recycling: One Community Gets With The Program.

Notice this sign has my favorite four letter word that begins with F and a couple of police state slogans. It also has another four letter word: Obey. What in the world does that mean?

One (statist) community on Turtle Island has decided to do something radical. They now let you dump yard waste at the landfill for free. Not long ago, the city landfill used to charge for each truckload of green waste as if it were garbage and then dump it all into a huge tub grinder. Bulldozers would then mix the pulverized material with trash and cover it with dirt.

I have a real problem with landfills. The landfill is where almost everything we're destroying the enivornment to create ends up, and this landfill in particular sucks because it occupies an arroyo that overlooks a beautiful freshwater lake. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that everything nasty in that landfill is going to leach out over the years and end up in the lake. Whoever thought that was a good site for a landfill must have had way too much education for their own good and probably got a kickback from somewhere.

Though the landfill itself has a recycling program, they still won't let citizens salvage at the dump which is a crime unto itself since I know that lots or reusable stuff is needlessly destroyed or disappears beneath mountains of garbage. But even if this dump is a crime against humanity and Nature, somebody in a position of power had one sensible idea. Why not let people dump green waste for free, grind it up, compost it and let them come get it for their gardens?

Here is the mountain people have built to honor the compost god.

Here is a pile of trash mixed in with the green waste even though the above sign clearly states this should not be done. If you look closely you'll see many empty cigarette packages and a beer carton, proving that people who don't respect their own bodies respect nothing.

And here is the finished product. It looks much better than it is. It works good as a top dressing, but if you till it under, it uses up all the soil nitrogen and stunts plant growth. Properly amended and aged I'm sure it would work great. I'd hesitate to use it in my veggie garden however. City folk are notorious for using pesticides and herbicides on their plants and dumping stuff like used motor oil and other nasty substances on their green waste before hauling it away, thinking they are being shrewd and clever. And I doubt that the dump slaves will bother to pick out the contaminants before they grind and compost it. It is however, a step in the right direction and a lot better than mixing it with trash. As long as it stays in the city where it originated and doesn't pollute the countryside I'm good with it and will contribute when practicable.