When I was a college student, I got my first teaching job as children's music director at a suburban OKC church. On Saturdays, I would ride around with the youth minister, meeting with kids who ride the bus and their parents to find out which kids would be on the bus in the morning (part of the idea was that coming to visit them would make the commit to coming). We had an active bus ministry, picking kids up and dropping kids off all over the metro area, so our Saturdays visiting kids and parents were long days. My minister friend would stop for a candy bar and a soda and eat a snack on the road. When he finished, he would crack his window, toss his empty wrappers out and say, "universal trashcan theory." This was a kind of inside joke that, for my friend, never got old. He said that, according to his Universal Trashcan Theory, there would actually be less of a trash problem if, instead of piling all of our trash in one place, we would just spread it around--if everyplace was our trashcan. Of course, it was really just a tongue-in-cheek way for a church youth minister to justify littering. I always found the joke, and the littering, immature and, even as a then young conservative, I found it to be insidiously bad stewardship of the planet.
But as I've thought about it lately, I've decided that he might be on to something. Obviously, it doesn't make us less covered in garbage of we spread it out (as my friend's theory suggested). Rather, it does the opposite. What it would do, and what maybe we need, is make us more aware of our garbage.
When I open up and eat my individually wrapped apple sauce cup and throw it away, I don't have to think about it again. It becomes part of the nebulous pile in my kitchen waste bin until I take it out. Then, once a week, a paid city worker shows up at my house, often before I'm even awake, and takes it away for me. From there, it goes to a well secured site on the outskirts of the city in areas where most of us never go, and they do things with our trash that we don't quite understand (which mostly involves the low tech process of covering it with dirt and high tech processes that keep the decomposing garbage from flowing into ground water).
Through this process of taking our trash and hiding it from us, we are insulated from our own impact on our environment. We can eat mandarin oranges out of a plastic cup with a plastic fork, drink water out of a plastic bottle, eat a sandwich out of a plastic baggie, eat tuna from a can packaged in a box with a plastic spoon and foil mayonnaise wrapper. Then I can forget that all this packaging even exists. A one cent per dollar sales tax takes care of this for me. I don't have to be confronted with my own growing pile of garbage, because I don't have to live with it.
If, on the other hand, we stop putting our trash in a blue container where it magically disappears, we instead throw it out the window into the neighborhood in which we live, we suddenly must live with the choice we make between a tupperware box and an individual apple sauce cup. As the Starbucks cups start to pile up on the corner, I'll be forced to decide whether or not I ought to just sit down and drink from a porcelain cup. (do they even offer those anymore?)
I'm not a tree-hugging hippie. But I've become increasingly aware that every time I cook dinner, I'm amazed at how much packaging I throw away. Every box I open contains three bags. And I throw all these away. Every time I go to Dunkin' Donuts (which, is like, a lot), I throw away a Styrofoam cup that will decompose sometime after kingdom-come. A college friend of my wife's from Finland used to talk about how amazed she was that everything here comes in disposable packages. In Finland, she explained, people would find this incredibly wasteful. We are addicted to disposable packaging. Of course, just because something is disposable doesn't mean that when I throw it away it's actually disposed of. It's just being moved to somewhere where I don't have to see it anymore.
So, instead, let's force ourselves to see it. Instead of moving it to some man-made no man's land, let's drop it in our own neighborhood. Because, and this is my revised Universal Trashcan Theory, if my neighborhood becomes my trashcan, maybe I'll think more carefully about what I throw away.
