Stephanie and Matt Murphy plan on using cloth diapers instead of disposable ones once their first baby arrives next month. They want to be good environmental citizens and reduce what they send to landfills, but there is another incentive, too.
“It’ll be nice not to have it sitting out there in the trash,” Ms. Murphy said. “That’s the main reason we’re doing it: to improve the odor of Portland.”
Just when their infant girl is due to arrive, Portland will be experiencing its first summer of biweekly garbage pickup. The change to every other week, introduced in cool weather last fall along with a weekly collection for food scraps, has reduced the amount of garbage that this progressive city is shipping to landfills by 44 percent.
The experience has not been entirely smooth. Since the garbage pickups were spaced out, the city’s main recycling company has complained that more garbage — disposable diapers included — is showing up in recycling bins. Residents complain about strong smells from garbage that has stewed for two weeks in the driveway.
Yet while some grumble, many say the inconveniences, and occasional startling whiff, are prices they are willing to pay to live on the leading edge of recycling.
“It was fuller and stinkier, but for the overall sake of the mission, we were willing to deal,” Penelope Miller, a resident with a 2-year-old daughter, said of her trash can.
Pioneers like Portland, Seattle and San Francisco have become so good at waste diversion that it is becoming harder to get much better. San Francisco reuses a whopping 78 percent of what enters its waste stream, compared with the national average of 34 percent.
As some press toward a goal of “zero waste,” the challenge is asking residents to conquer what officials call “the ick factor” of organic waste, endure fewer garbage pickups, become more sophisticated sorters and live without things like plastic grocery bags and polystyrene containers for their takeout food.
Source: The New York Times
By Willam Yardley