Trash or treasure?

Has anyone ever said to you, "Honey, please take out the trash?" And so you did, but then what?

On average, American consumers "take out" about 250 million tons of trash each year. Some goes to landfills, some to incinerators and waste-burning manufacturing plants, and some to recycling centers, only to delay the inevitable when it will one day become trash again. Sure, I pick up a few choice treasures at our local recycling center occasionally, but I have to admit, I take a lot of it back a few weeks later after I have learned why someone "trashed" it the first time.

As I continue to focus on some of the environmental tragedies of inner-city culture, I was stunned to see a man with a leaf blower actually blowing the trash off the sidewalk in front of his store and out from underneath his overused BMW. Just like fall leaves, he was blowing discarded papers, cups, newspapers, and plastic bottles back into the street, or onto his neighbor's property. I guess it was his perspective on recycling.

We recycle and process trash as the environmentally prudent thing to do, while people in many third world nations recycle and process trash for survival. For some, municipal dumps are a source of food, building materials, cooking fuel, and even clothing. I just wonder how many treasures someone from the third world could find in these carefully packed bags of "All American Waste."