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Jen Boothroyd of Brewer is a master gardener apprentice with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, and a member of the Brewer Bird & Garden Club and the Peony Society of Maine.
I grew up in an old house in rural Maine. Like many other old homesteads, there was a dump site out back, where the inhabitants of the past had tossed their trash. As kids, my brothers and I liked to go out digging around in the dump. It was in the woods, shady and mossy, and filled with rusty old cans and bottles with old, weird-looking labels and logos. There were corroding iron parts off a car or some piece of equipment, shards of broken glass with interesting, embossed textures and there was even an old TV in one spot.
They may not have been “clean,” but we never thought of them as dirty or disgusting; they just had “the woods” on them. It was easy to wipe away the soil and flick off the pillbugs, and this old stuff was as fun to examine and play with as a cool stick, weird shelf fungus or any other forest treasure.
Reflecting on this from the perspective of adulthood, gives me a more comprehensive understanding of these home rubbish piles. It’s likely that food, paper and other organic wastes were also thrown on the heap, but they had long since decomposed. I don’t recall any plastic trash, but that would make sense, because no one would have been actively discarding anything in our backyard later than 1970 or so, and the ubiquitous use of plastics as packaging hadn’t really ramped up until afterward. There was no filth, no smell or any of the other markers of what we today call garbage. Just some cool old stuff in the woods.
Back then, when times, and trash, were simpler, a backyard rubbish heap may have been something of an eyesore (hence the location of ours, just beyond the treeline in the woods), but I don’t imagine too many families thought of it as “disgusting.” But then, their trash wasn’t as disgusting as ours today. There were no dirty disposable diapers or pet food cans for every day of the week. Families did not generate mountains of plastic packaging from takeout, safety seals or individually wrapped everything.
Imagine if, today, your household garbage needed to be tossed into your backyard, rather than neatly collected from the end of your driveway and hauled away to become someone else’s problem. What would your trash heap look like after a week or a year? Would your trash be easily absorbed and broken down by its natural surroundings? Even if you are currently throwing away compostables like food scraps and paper, if they are encased within a plastic trash bag, air, water and nature’s decomposers can’t get at that refuse to do their jobs.
Would your backyard be big enough to contain your family’s garbage? Would you shop differently, knowing that every single K-Cup or cottage cheese container would be lying there on your property, indefinitely? Would you enjoy your flower gardens as much if the errant bread bag caught the breeze and snagged on your rose bush? Would the realization that the children, pets and wild animals in your neighborhood regularly encounter what you dispose of lead you to think twice about something before you casually toss it?
The truth is, we are lucky and secure in our first-world knowledge that we will never have to live that reality, which makes it all too easy to carelessly consume and dispose of things without acknowledging that they will end up in someone’s backyard, somewhere. I am not advocating for bringing back the practice of throwing trash in our backyards, of course. But I am advocating for shifting your mindset as a consumer and a citizen, to think about your own waste footprint, as if you needed to see it every day from your kitchen window.
