Let’s talk trash

Why I'll be talking trash, some Tuesdays, for a year.

People were already asking ‘why are you doing this?’ before I even started working on this post.

‘You’re going to write a newsletter for a year, for free? But why?’

‘Why on recycling/reuse? What’s so interesting about rubbish?’

‘And why Tuesday?’

Before we get to why I’m doing this…

I know, I know, we don’t call our rubbish ‘trash’ here in Australia.

But Tuesday Rubbish Talk doesn’t sound as good as Tuesday Trash Talk. Or Tuesday Recycling Talk. Or Tuesday Reuse Talk.

Back when I did corporate content strategy work, I spent a number of years working in a really fun service design team with Australia’s biggest telco. I kept going back because of the people. For me, it’s always about the people.

Each day at around 3pm we’d step away from computers, look out the floor-to-ceiling windows over Melbourne and engage in what we called Talk Shit O’clock for around 10 minutes.

Talk Shit O’clock was the highlight of the day. It was a lot of fun. I doubt we would’ve got out of our ergonomic chairs if the name used words like ‘mindfulness’ or ‘wellbeing’.

Why I’m doing this

I blame the local sustainability expert who did a thorough and incredibly useful energy assessment of our new home in country Victoria.

He said that our thin 1970s windows were thermal weak points and recommended using thin sheets of clear plastic that can be secured to the window frame and tightened with a hairdryer. The plastic lasts for around a season.

“What happens to the plastic at the end of the season?” I asked.

“It goes in the bin,” he said.

“Gah.”

“Ahh, you hate landfill,” he said, nodding, knowing.

I hate landfill

It’s not landfill itself that I hate. I love a good tip – a good, organised tip. I love seeing the well-separated bins and mountains of green waste that’ll end up as garden mulch. I appreciate that there’s a place to drop off electrical goods these days.

And I love a good tip shop, like Round Again in Mildura. Ballarat doesn’t have a good tip shop, but that’s a story for another day.

My mum loved Mildura’s tip – many decades before Round Again started. Almost-monthly rituals of dropping off gardening clippings and then crawling all over the piles of rubbish looking for treasures.

No year-old broken $10 toasters. No bags of barely touched fast food. No body parts (we’ve been watching a lot of Law & Order SVU lately).

Everything was mixed in together. Banana skins on top of bookcases. Apple cores inside old winter coat pockets. We knew to watch out for broken glass, but otherwise it felt fairly safe.

I think our kitchen table came from the tip. Chrome legs and a battered Formica top. Mum updated the tabletop in the same shade of Kermit green when she re-laminated the kitchen bench.

Some people don’t respect landfill

There are some landfill horror stories that keep me up at night.

Around a decade ago, my favourite uncle told me that he and his family hired a skip and chucked out everything they didn’t want to move to their new house. I still imagine it all in that skip – newish books, clothes, shoes, hats, furniture, electrical foods, nail clippers. Gah!

And a decade before that, my best friend told me that one of her mum’s friends replaces her furniture and clothes every year. I still wonder if all the ‘old’ stuff ended up in landfill. Gah!

My mother and both grandmothers had a big influence on me when it came to stuff. All three loved to shop and dress up. In fact, one of the grandmothers had two successful frock shops in the 80s and 90s.

They valued their stuff. They mended and reused. What they didn’t need anymore, they gave away. My 97-year-old frock shop nanna is still giving her stuff away. But that’s another story for another day.

“Do the thing that breaks your heart.”

One of the Talk Shit O’clockers* said this to me one day when we were ruminating over how to pursue work with purpose rather than spend our days tweaking CTAs and reworking automated emails.

There are things that break my heart a lot more than the things people really shouldn’t send to landfill – like the awful things people do to animals and each other. There are strong women better equipped than me to invest time and energy into animal and human rights.

I care about recycling and reuse, but I’m aware that I’m still a relative newbie despite having worked on a number sustainability projects over the years (thanks Sustainability Victoria, Department of Sustainability and Environment, Melbourne Water, etc).

So, I hope to spend a year talking trash and working out who’s doing what and where the good people are (the recycling/reuse the Talk Shit O’clockers).

I have questions that I expect there’ll be answers for. Do rich people recycle? Is recycling a feminist issue? What happened to Planet Ark?

They know more than me

“Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change. Some are habits of mind, some are industry propaganda. Sometimes, the situation has changed but the stories haven’t, and people follow the old versions, like outdated maps, into dead ends.”

Rebecca Solnit

Save for later

• ‘Companies bidding for millions in federal government (construction) contracts will need to meet new sustainability standards, including for the use of recycled content, as part of a phase-in of rules designed to boost Australia’s circular economy.’ Anything to do with government work can be complex and convoluted, but reading this makes me a little more hopeful that things are moving forward rather than backwards. Sometimes it feels as though the onus is too much on the individual to fix the mess.

• ‘About 25 per cent of our municipality’s recycling material is contaminated.’ This was in the mayor’s column in the free local newspaper. ‘The Victorian average is 17 per cent. But more recently, our contamination has been as high as 45 per cent.’ The cause: plastic bags. Bloody plastic bags.

• ‘So, in partnership with Sustainability Victoria we are proud to launch the initiative Small Acts, Big Impacts campaign to help raise awareness about what should be going in your yellow lid bins.’ Recycling Groundhog Day. I try to keep on top of what should go into each bin and I still get confused. Will it ever get any easier?

* I asked this Talk Shit O’clocker to read the draft before I sent it out to the world.

“WAIT! WHAT? Did I say that?” she said.

“Why don't I remember these things? I do remember when I was living in a community in Italy that a super-wise American Indian shaman came to visit the community. She said: "Your passion is your wounding". That stuck. I think that statement is nuanced and doesn't always have to be, but perhaps the essence of it is that that things you really care about and love may make it hurt at times.”