Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Remote Living, Part 13: Trash Talk

Just a quick one today, with two questions.  Because "Let no questions be left unanswered" is my motto.

What do you do with garbage if you have no garbage pick-up?

As with so many things here, we do it ourselves. 

The villages have what are called transfer stations. These are places with really big dumpsters where locals bring their trash, and then the trash is trucked out eventually.

We go about every other Friday and bring a few bags of trash to the transfer station about ten miles away. And when I say "we," I mean "A. and Poppy." Poppy LOVES going to get rid of trash. The stop at the small store in the village for a treat that she usually manages to charm out of Daddy might have something to do with it.

Edited to add: The comment from Linda reminded me that I should have said I do burn cardboard and paper in a burn barrel. Burn barrels are, uh, barrels. Made of metal, so they won't melt while you're burning things.

What about recycling?

Unfortunately, that does not exist here. As far as I'm aware, the closest recycling center is a two-hour drive. So we don't recycle.

Edited to add because man, I was tired when I wrote this and forgot stuff: Except! All food waste is taken care of either by the chickens, the dogs, or the compost pile. I consider that recycling. The chickens recycle the scraps into eggs, the compost recycles it into garden fertilizer, and the dogs . . . okay, the dogs don't really recycle it. They just eat it. But they keep the coyotes away, so they're worth a few scraps.

Let's end with a photo, shall we?


We may not have garbage pick-up, but we can ride a horse anytime we want. Trade-offs.

4 comments:

  1. Beautiful picture.
    When I read the title to this post I thought you were going to say that you have a burn barrel & burn your trash, as my parents did back in the day. And no recycling for them either, everything went into that barrel. :)
    Linda

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  2. Linda: I do have a burn barrel! Thanks for the reminder. I updated the post, because how sad if the world didn't know the full story. :-)

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  3. We had no trash service growing up so we had a 55 gallon drum that my Daddy would light up every Friday evening and it was fun as kids go save a few things back and throw them in.

    As for recycling, I read an article a few months back where only 40% of most recycling collected is actually recycled and the rest ends up in landfills. That's a great start, but dampened my zeal to be fanatical about it.

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  4. Beautiful Picture!
    -Monica

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