The remains (of Christmas day)

 It's the first garbage day after Christmas!  The steadily increasing complexity of waste disposal in Vancouver has me wrapping, bagging and boxing food scraps to abide by the rules without creating a mess in my green bin. Many editions of The Vancouver Sun were involved. Photo by John Denniston.

The main culprit was a 25-pound turkey. Even after I'd turned it into soup, there were still a lot of remains to be wrapped.

Once upon a time, every Vancouver householder had a garbage bin. Into it went all their waste – paper, plastic, grass clippings, food scraps, tin cans, glass bottles. Every week, on garbage day, voila! a big truck came around and picked it up.

 Things changed. At Christmas, I realize how very, very much. Now we have three separate garbage streams, each with their specific rules and collection days, and three separate trucks to grind up and down the allies (or in snow and ice, not) to pick them up.

There’s the garbage garbage – everything that doesn’t fit in the other two categories, but none that does – which is picked up every other week. There’s the recycling, collected weekly, with a blue box for plastic, grey box for glass and a yellow bag for paper. Then there’s the category that screams that whoever created this system never ran a household. Into the magical “green” garbage bin, also collected weekly, go all your compostables, from grass clippings to potato peelings to the dessert-that-bombed-and-had-to-be-tossed. Garden greenery makes perfect sense, but imagine tossing gooey, oily, smelly food into a big bare bin and not expecting a mess. Can you say maggots? Stinky summer days? Can you say a huge weekly clean-up job?

Since paper (but no plastic) is allowed in the green bin, I get around the mess factor by wrapping, wrapping, wrapping food scraps in layers of newspaper. Then, if they’re really messy, putting them in paper bags. Then, if they’re really, really messy, putting the paper bags in newspaper-lined cardboard boxes. That’s after they’ve all been frozen to take them through to garbage day. Mostly, this is a minor issue, time spent bowing to the gods of progress and green living. But at Christmas, when there are the remains of a 25-pound turkey to dispose of, along with all the other inevitable leftovers of holiday feasting, all that wrapping and freezing and bagging and boxing makes me wonder what’s really being saved here. I think longingly of the days when one big garbage bin took care of it all.