That Giant Floating Island

You know that giant floating island of plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? I'm pretty sure I'm personally responsible for that. Clearcut forests and depleted natural resources? My fault. Climate change? Blame me. As a result of all this guilt I find it extremely difficult to throw anything away. Putting things in the garbage can is not a simple act for me. My brain gets in the way.

It probably comes in part from living on a tiny speck of rock in the middle of the ocean for so long. A rock where pretty much everything everyone needs to live has to arrive by boat or plane. And all that stuff that arrives eventually has to go somewhere. When I threw something in the trash on Kauai I knew exactly where it was going. It was going to the west side of the island into a gigantic pile. A pile that has been in a perpetual state of crisis for as long as I can remember. A crisis that all those hardworking county employees were always trying to figure out how to manage. Could they extend the life of the landfill again? Would they finally find a location for a new one that everyone could agree on? I am not the only one tormented by trash.

My response to all this worry about waste was to become what my husband fondly refers to as The Queen of Recycling. I rinsed out all my plastic bottles. I broke down cardboard boxes. I flattened empty toilet paper rolls. I called the catalog companies and made them stop sending me all that glossy paper. I loaded up the car and went to the recycling bins every week. On Christmas and birthdays I smoothed and folded all the crumpled tissue paper. I saved bows and boxes and bags so they could be used again. And I started having garage sales.

Garage sales are a lot of work and the monetary reward is small. But for me it was never about the money. It was about the challenge of seeing how much stuff I could keep out of the landfill. Things that even Goodwill wouldn't take. It was about what I could get someone to think was worth using, with just a little bit of fixing or some brilliant marketing strategies. I remember the triumphal moment one year when I finally figured out how to use all those plastic bags the newspaper comes in that I could never bring myself to throw away. I found some old t-shirts that I knew the thrift stores would never accept and I cut them up into neat squares. Then I folded those little squares and stuffed them into the bags and called them Bags of Rags. And I sold every one.

I love having garage sales. On Kauai I had them at least once a year and sometimes more. One of my favorite things in all the world was to go through and purge my house and start a new garage sale pile. And part of our mission when we arrived here at my in-laws' home on Oahu was to do the same thing. We wanted to help Gary's mom clean out her entire house and then have a giant sale at the end. So that's what we did.

Throughout the year we collected and sorted and boxed. The pile in the garage grew. The growing mound lowered property values. The neighbors despaired that it would ever go away.

But then one day we laid everything out all nice and pretty, and invited the world to come shop. 

And the world came. And they shopped. They lined up on the road and created a traffic jam. We sold tons of stuff. We gave away things that weren't worth selling. The high point for me was when I took the old plastic kitty litter hotel that had been languishing on the side of the house waiting to go to the dump, cleaned it up, repaired it with some zip ties, and a happy smiling woman took it home for her kittens to sleep in. Victory is sweet.

And in the end, property values went back up, and one of the neighbors came over to congratulate Gary on how clean the garage was. It felt like our work here was done.

In a way it was a relief when we moved to Oahu and I learned that they incinerate a large part of their waste and turn it into energy. Now, when I see an empty toilet paper roll in the garbage can, I am able to look away with hardly any sense of shame. But that giant floating island is still out there, and somehow it makes me feel compelled to never stop having garage sales. And to always reuse my Christmas bows. Which makes me feel as if I'm saving the world.

Some pretty cool reusable wrapping thingies here.