Change of the Week: Say Goodbye to String Cheese and Juice Boxes
After he’s slurped down the last drop of apple juice, after he’s polished off the last morsel of string cheese; Thomas goes over to the trash can to throw “away” the empty juice box and the barren cheese wrapper.
If you live in Pasadena, Altadena, Glendale, South Pasadena, Sierra Madre, or San Marino this is “away”: the Scholl Canyon Landfill. Think about the name for a moment, the Scholl Canyon Landfill. Beginning in the early 1960s the communities of the San Gabriel Valley along with the city of Los Angeles took a canyon in the foothills above Glendale and Eagle Rock and began to fill it with page after page of old Los Angeles Times, an unfathomable number of dirty diapers, water bottles galore, and everything else that we, as a community, have decided we no longer have any use for. Our next door neighbor tells of how when he first bought his house he would have to drive down into the canyon to dump a load of trash. Now Jeff, who has been to the landfill a couple of times cleaning our yard and house of all the items left by the previous owner, tells me that the canyon is essentially no more, filled to the brim. The city of Glendale estimates that the landfill will be full by 2020. It is not clear where our trash will go “away” to after that.
Last year Jeff and I talked about making a New Year’s resolution to try and go “zero waste”; to throw nothing away. We quickly realized that doing so was a radical life change, something we couldn’t accomplish overnight. Over the past year, we’ve made many small changes to eliminate waste. Last week we made a change which might seem trivial to some, but to us was significant. Those of us with children know the value of having convenient, healthy, snack food; two of our favorites are string cheese and apple juice boxes. But, you know what…an apple and cheese slices packed in a reusable container are just as convenient and don’t fill up a canyon. There will be no more string cheese, each piece individually sheathed in plastic, each group of eight bagged in another casing of plastic bought in this house. There will be no more cute little boxes of juice, each with their own straw, each “family” of four sheathed in a plastic wrapper. Giving up string cheese and juice boxes won’t save the world from environmental degradation, but it is a few more things that won’t go in a canyon to hang around long after we are gone. I also hope that I am teaching our children that there is no such thing as throwing it “away”.
March 13th, 2010 at 12:46 am
Yea, glad you are on-board.
March 14th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Sitting here at working eating a tart granny smith and drinking water from a reusable bottle.I guess you can cut up the mozarella chesse into thin long slices for T & H, as its just a big block of string cheese. I agree we need to recycle and use more things over.On the railroad with the little red engines, we sell the old rail , steel and iron track materials and iron and steel scrap to a steel recycle place, we buy used larger rail to replace the small rail and used track parts to repair and repalce worn out track, We also fix and repair many of the track parts in place with the use of a welder to save buying new or used materials. We buy only new wood ties that come from a renewable source,we give away some of the old ties also for landscape ties and grind up the ties that cannot be used for landscaping and sell them to a bio-fuel electrical generation facility. All the waste oil we have goes to an oil recycle facility to be cleaned and reused or sent to a co-generation plant, all the scrap paper we generate we sell to a paper recycler.
We try to reduce waste here at work because the more waste you generate the more we have to pay to dispose of it it good business to try and reduce waste.
We have a filter on the drinking water at home so we use less and less or any bottled water and it saves us money.
Everytime I open one of those little boxes and put in the straw I would squeeze the box and get juice all over me so down with the juice box and up with a pitcher of juice or lemonade in the fridge.
See you soon lots of Love and give the boys a Huge Hug PAPA Dave
OH yeah Hugs are just some Love being recycled
March 14th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Nooo….. aghghhahaa… not string cheese! I am not ready for string cheese, but we are down to just about one bag of trash a week and some of that can be composted. I feel like a trip to the landfill (cause that’s what it is – a Land Fill) should be a part of every child’s curriculum. Maybe coincide with Earth Day if they need some occasion to mark.
March 16th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
I love the idea of a class field trip to the landfill. I remember visiting a sewage treatment plant in elementary school and it certainly left an impression on me.
I missed string cheese for the first week, but now am not nostalgic at all. Besides, organic string cheese is on the order of $10/pound…for that price I can buy some nice local cheese, cut it up to take along with us, and it tastes much better.