DUMMERSTON — It doesn't take long into a typical Green Up Day excursion to notice a few things that reveal a lot about yourself doing the trash pickup and about those whom I'll refer to hereafter as “trashers.” (I much prefer this term to the conventional euphemistic term “litterers,” as “litter” is much too polite a term for the garbage that trashers feel free to dump at will.)
Not too long after filling our second or third bag of disgusting refuse from a lovely local pond, I asked my daughter her thoughts as she was crouching into yet another body of water to pull swill dumped from probably the same trasher.
“Feeling angry,” she remarked. She also observed that “people who dump trash are poor.”
That got me thinking about how an anthropologist might proceed and extend the analysis of our findings and our experience as bleeding-heart, slightly-upper-middle-class, privileged liberals picking up other people's trash in our own local community.
To wit:
• Trashers aren't co-op shoppers - to put it mildly! It's no breaking news that the typical refuse is fast-food waste and packaging from the usual suspects in the junk food world - packaging that wouldn't biodegrade even after the half-life expiration of the nuke waste nestled on the banks of the Connecticut River in Vernon.
• The corollary to this observation is that trashers are probably low-income people who rent and can't pay for trash pickup. More on this later.
• Trashers are more than likely addicted to some substance. Cigarette packets, beer and wine bottles and, yes, more than a few syringes made up more than half the trash.
• Trashers will gravitate toward bodies of water. Probably since so many of our roads follow the paths laid down by flowing water, it follows that there is where the trash is to be found.
But there is also an uncanny attraction to trashing ponds with several weeks' worth of garbage that would normally go to the landfill. Infuriating at best!
• Trashers are really only the conduits for the real trashers: the marketing-industrial complex that packages and sells trash on the outside and the inside of its products.
* * *
Ultimately, this is where my anger landed after a few hours on Green Up Day. Just like the fossil-fuel industry that gets to sell poison to our atmosphere and externalizes the cost to the air and atmosphere and to us, the other purveyors of poison we directly consume, the packaging industry, gets to pass on its costs to those of us victimized by its waste stream.
Sometimes, I feel like a sap. I have compassion for the poor saps who are addicted and hooked on the crap that is sold in all the convenience stores and then dump it for me to pick up.
But what I'd like to see is a packaging tax to make the trashers most responsible pay. I know this is akin to Bernie Sanders' idea to force hedge funders on Wall Street to be taxed in order to fund tuition for public higher education.
There would be no faster to way to fill the Statehouse with grocer's-association lobbyists than to propose such a tax on packaging. It would be a feeding frenzy on those liberals who want to create another “business unfriendly” practice in Vermont.
Realistically, it might also amount to a regressive tax on those who are food insecure and, until we can get a liveable wage for the vast majority of people here, that tax would be problematic.
However, those of you who spent hours bagging the filth that these packaging poison purveyors introduce into our environment know from whence my packaging tax idea comes.
Until we can mitigate the source of the garbage flow, we'll have to devote plenty of hours of Green Up Day to the dirty work of cleaning up for the trashers.