Finally, sitting in my driveway, is the thing I’ve needed most for years. It’s not a new truck, although that would be useful. It’s not a motorcycle, although middle-age is upon me, I have not contracted that particular disease. It’s not a snowblower, either, although that would probably be very useful within a couple of weeks.
It’s a shiny new green dumpster. And I have already started to feed it.

I started tearing bits of this house apart years ago. My plan was quite simple: pile up the garbage and get rid of it when there’s enough to fill a dumpster. While doing that, I extracted and used the material I could. I spent a lot of time pulling nails, for example. I also burned the majority of the wood that could not be reused.
But there are just so many things you simply cannot either reuse or burn. And it turns out there is no way to be rid of them except either a trip to a dump or get someone else to do it. For instance, I have all the glass from the windows I replaced in this house. They were sliding windows, originally, single panes in aluminum frames. I have twenty of them. I thought I might make a greenhouse using them, actually, since they are fairly large. But I get the distinct feeling I am never ever going to do that. So, I think all that glass has to make its way to the great beyond.

It might be interesting to think of what would have been left if this renovating had been taking place 100 years ago. A house from that time period, if it did not have brick on the outside, was covered in wood, at least in this area. Other places in the world would have seen houses clad in stucco. But here, wood siding or brick was all you could expect to see. Left on the ground, brick will turn back into mud (especially bricks how they were 100 years ago). Wood, of course, will rot away in almost no time. Glass is a different matter. Glass doesn’t rot. But, of course, if you crush it, it turns back into sand.
And the house from 100 years ago would have an interior that matched the outside. Walls either wood or plaster-over-wood. The floors were practically always just bare wood, perhaps with some paint and maybe a rug. The rug, if you brought it outside, would have rotted away to nothing within a couple of years. Try that with new grey carpet they run through the bedrooms of houses now.

That’s the real point of comparison. Houses now are made out of so much stuff you just can’t get rid of. Yes, they frame them with wood and sheath them in OSB or plywood. But then they wrap them in plastic. And then they fill them with plastic. Plastic is a magical kind of thing.
We call it plastic because it’s a material that can be shaped into anything we want. And we want a lot of stuff.
But in the meantime, people complain about how we ruin the earth through pollution. They do that while sitting in a plastic chair, drinking from a water bottle, wearing underwear that is held up by the magic of elastic plastic, in their house which is made to last forever or until boredom sets in and all of the fixtures and features need to be replaced. These people would likely frown on my backyard burning of scraps of broken wood.
The thing about hypocrisy is people don’t realize they’re being hypocritical.

At this point in history, it’s best to admit just how blatantly wasteful and destructive we are. Just like alcoholism, it’s a problem no one will truly deal with until it’s been fully admitted. However, while there are still people who think that they personally are not responsible, because they themselves have such a small carbon footprint, nothing will change.
One of the great ironies of the age is the fact that so many recycling facilities are in place to reuse materials such as steel, aluminum, and glass, just at the point in history when all those things are being phased out of retail trade in favour of materials which cannot so easily be recycled. But mayonnaise in a plastic jar doesn’t break as easily.

But I’ve gone on about all this before. I’ll likely go on about it again. But I get irritated when I hear someone say reducing waste is my own personal responsibility. It quite obviously is not. It amounts to the same thing as saying you can end a war by standing in the middle of a blazing battlefield with your eyes shut, your fingers in your ears, yelling ‘I can’t hear you!” over and over again.
So, I’ll just go fill my dumpster and be happy to get the junk out of my sight.