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Back when I used to throw food scraps in the trash without thinking twice
I grew up in a household where everything went in the garbage can. Now I live in Portland and have three bins for compost, recycling, and landfill. It took me about 6 months after moving here to finally get the hang of sorting everything right, especially when my youngest kept tossing apple cores in the wrong bin. Has anyone else had a hard time breaking old habits around waste disposal?
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emmaclark1mo ago
You know what I've been thinking about that nobody mentions? The whole guilt trip thing when you mess up. Like I had this moment last week where I caught myself about to toss a coffee filter in the regular bin at my friend's house and my heart literally started pounding. We've turned garbage sorting into this performance where one mistake makes you feel like a bad person. I actually keep a little cheat sheet taped inside my cabinet door because my brain still wants to treat everything like it's 1995 and the world is one big dump.
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rubyk261mo ago
My roommate once had a full on panic because she threw a milk carton in the recycling without rinsing it first and thought the recycling truck drivers would know. She spent like twenty minutes fishing it out of the bin and running it under the tap before she felt okay about it again. Do you think we've just swapped one kind of trash shame for a fancier version?
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ray3561mo ago
My buddy Dave moved to San Francisco a few years back and he told me this story about how his neighbor actually called him out for throwing a banana peel in the regular trash. He was so embarrassed because the guy pulled it right out and held it up like it was some kind of crime scene evidence or something. Dave said he felt like a total idiot standing there while his neighbor explained the difference between green waste and landfill for ten minutes. Now he's got little sticky notes on all his bins so he doesn't mess up again, but he still texts me pictures when he finds a yogurt cup in the compost by accident.
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