Too Many Egg Cartons

Much to my surprise, I learned not too long ago that my local waste management company won’t take paper egg cartons in my blue curbside recycling bin. They advise us that the paper fibers in the carton are too short for them to be put into further use. The same goes for the cardboard tubes at the center of paper towels or toilet paper rolls. By the time the paper reaches any of these kinds of things, they’ve reached the end of their useful life.

With this in mind, I think it’s awesome that my local recycling center takes egg cartons. Folks who raise their own hens have a ready supply of cartons to use, cartons that otherwise would have ended up in a landfill.

But apparently too much is too much. When I was wandering around town with my camera the other day, I stopped in to the recycling center to check on whether I could drop off a stack of ink jet printer cartridges that have been piling up at home. When I pulled up to the information counter, I encountered a rather sizable collection of egg cartons with a sign saying they can’t take any more.

The whole scene made me smile. It seems the supply is outpacing demand. At least people are dropping them off at the recycling center rather than sending them to a landfill.

My wife and I are diligent recyclers. It’s so incredibly easy to separate material that can be reused from the garbage that’s destined for a landfill that I don’t understand folks who don’t bother doing it. The sorry state of the market for recyclables makes me wonder if the public interest in reducing the amount of waste we send to a landfill has risen to the same level that urban transit reached in the mid-twentieth century, when struggling private streetcar and bus operators became public entities for the sake of ensuring the continuation of a vital service in many American cities.

I think that landfills are one of the saddest sights imaginable. They are a glaring indictment of apathy, overindulgence, and gluttony especially in a civilization blessed with a level of abundance that is unprecedented in all of human history. I have long thought that grade school field trips to a landfill ought to be universal and mandatory. At least once in our lives, we should all see for ourselves where the garbage we put into our trash bins ultimately ends up. It doesn’t just disappear. We should all witness overwhelming mountains of trash—what they look like, what they smell like, what they do to their surroundings, and so on. I want to believe that such an experience would change our collective behavior in a meaningful way.