I recently made a trip home to NC for a visit with family and friends. Hence, some of the radio silence lately. Once I settled in there, it felt as though I had stepped back in time, into the dark ages (or at least several decades). Internet access was not available at one of the two places I stayed, people spoke and acted slloooowwwly, Styrofoam cups were everywhere and recycling was extremely hard to come by. Food scrap composting wasn’t an option at all. In Henderson County, where I grew up and visited, there was no curbside pick-up for the county and only one option for drop off…the county dump. Curbside pick-up was offered to the city of Hendersonville, roughly equivalent in size to two San Francisco city blocks. However, for most of the county, recycling was out of reach.

My family, still well within the county line, lives about 15 miles from the dump. So, a round trip would take a minimum of an hour including time for driving, unloading and sorting. Most folks don’t have or make the time and space to keep their recyclables separate and haul them to the dump. This is especially true with gas prices what they are now. It is not just a matter of time and space, but money.

Even at the home of my most conscientious friends in Henderson Co., glass bottles, aluminum cans and paper were still going in the trash. This was very painful to me. I was tempted to dig through their trash, pull out all the recyclables, and haul them back to Asheville to one of the drop-off recycling centers. This wasn’t a very rational thought. It would only work on the days I was there, and then everything would go right back in the dump again once I left. This pained me even more. I thought, “Am I a radical for wanting to dig these precious materials out of their trash? Why is this a radical thought?”

Food scraps were even harder for me to throw away. I ate every last bite of every meal served to me in restaurants. Fortunately, I ate at some really good restaurants, so this was not difficult. When I ate at my family’s house, I threw any remaining food scraps out in the back yard for the animals to enjoy. I figured this would be better than sending the scraps to the landfill where they would eventually create methane.

I was often seen standing over the waste bin with something in my hand that I just could not throw away, but which everyone else expected me to. They didn’t understand my hesitation. Or, I would separate plastics from paper in preparation of recycling and composting, only to find only one option for disposal...waste. This was the weirdest situation. To have knowledge that these materials could save tons of green house gases if recycled and reused, but no means or infrastructure to exert the knowledge. Understanding the consequences of throwing the materials away and having to accept this reality was a struggle for me.

Don’t fear. All materials were not lost. I was able to save a car load worth of materials from the landfill while I was there. My Grandma Lucy was able to hide newspapers and aluminum cans in the basement (so they didn’t get thrown out with the garbage) since my last visit, and I took those to a drop-off center in Asheville along with five, large, heavy bags of mixed paper. I was also able to take a bag of my old stuffed animals and clothes to GoodWill for reuse.

The most interesting thing I learned while in NC was that the Henderson County landfill was capped late last year, and all the garbage from the county now has to be hauled to a landfill in South Carolina. The SC landfill is almost full, though, so it is likely that the Henderson Co. waste will need to be hauled to Georgia by the end of this year. The county is ripe for recycling, which would save not only the materials for reuse, but also the cost of hauling materials that aren’t really waste across two state lines to waste them.

Why has wasting become so common place in America? Even when faced with disposal costs that may double, why isn’t this county laying the foundation and infrastructure for recycling? Why wasn’t recycling put in place years and years ago? How have we come so far with technology, but we can’t recapture resources more effectively in our homes and communities?

I am continually amazed and disturbed at our lack of progress in material management in the U.S. I fear by the time we learn the valuable lesson of saving materials for recycling, or avoiding single-use materials all together, and build the infrastructure necessary to collect, process and reuse materials throughout the U.S., it may be too late to do much good. We are doing an overwhelming amount of damage in the interim.