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The Amount of Garbage Someone Has Says A Lot About Their Wealth
The trash on my street hides conspicuous consumption
Massive green bins line the curb like sentries keeping watch over the neighborhood. Handles face outward to assist sanitation collectors and occasionally, a neatly tied plastic bag sits next to an army green can.
It is still dark at 6:30 as I make may morning lap around the block with my dog, Harlow. Every so often, she pulls up short, excited by a smell radiating from the garbage, but I tug on her leash and guide her onward. Every day we make this walk, but today, the cans draw my attention. Over the past nine years, pulling my bins to the curb three days a week has become normal, and like my neighbors, I stuff my garbage down each Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday night.
At the end of the block, Harlow and I pause before crossing the street and I glance around. The sun sits low in the sky, giving a hazy purple-gray tint to the world around me, and the street lights still cast a warm, golden glow across the neighborhood. Despite the peaceful atmosphere, discomfort nibbles at me.
I zero my gaze in on the garbage bins. In order to fill those bins as often as we do, we are buying and discarding dozens of items per week.
What does our garbage say about us?
A fact: garbage is a luxury.
When I was a child living along the Detroit River, we mended, fixed, reused, and handed down. If it didn’t fall into one of those categories, the item was then, and only then, placed in the trash. Same with food. We ate whatever leftovers we had until the containers were scrapped clean. Food never spoiled because we ate it.
We also had a neighborhood “garbage picker,” a man who biked through the alleys the night before garbage day and searched the cans for treasures. None of us knew what he did with his findings, but we kids would point and laugh that someone would pick through the trash. There was nothing worth value there, so why did he bother?
It wasn’t until later, as a teen and young twenty-something, that my friends and I discovered the value of digging through other people’s cast-offs. We found functioning microwaves, bikes, tools, and even gently used…
