Garbage

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"From dust you are, to dust you shall return."


True.  Even the most durable stuff we humans invent will eventually decay and turn to dust.

When I was a kid, the only waste we had was ashes. Even the fecal matter returned to the earth, and no one had to "manage" it to suit certain specifications.

The waste we were confronted with was vegetable peels, nut shells, and the slip of paper wrapping around bones and meat from the butcher. In those days, when we had no wood to burn, all such waste founds its way into the kitchen stove; even the bones and peelings after they had dried.

The ashes from all burnables was sprinkled unto the garden soil and worked in. After we moved back to the Munich, and no longer had a garden, the ashes from the cookstove were placed in city-supplied containers then picked up by the city.

We lived in a five story tenement with eleven apartments. The pick-up was once a month. Very rarely there were more than two trashcans on the sidewalk for the city to empty. Ours was not emptied but two or three times a year. There simply was no trash. Plastic had not yet begun to cover the earth. Canned food was home made and the jars reused. Tin cans did not exist, nor did boxed foods, at least not in our lives.

We had no refrigeration, therefore we bought our provisions the day we cooked them. My mother kept a small drum of flour and a good sized tin can full of sugar ready at all times. I went to the various stores, the butcher, the baker, the dairy store, the veggie market, to buy one egg or some soup greens, or a block of yeast. We had a cloth bag or container for everything; a milk can, a flour can, a lard can. A large linen poke for potatoes which was also used to drag home blocks of peat for the stove.

DO I WANT TO GO BACK TO THE OLD DAYS? . . . Not really.

But think about it, what do we all pay to have our trash "managed" now-a days.

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