A Little Village’s Little Garbage Problem

By Mike Gold

Our talent for tossing aside just about anything we get our hands on is unmatched.

When I go for a walk in Pleasantville, scattered around in various places on the ground are plastic bottles, metal cans, and cigarette butts. They’re sunning themselves in the gutters of the streets, or they’ve planted themselves on the lawns of neighbors’ homes. They’re taking naps at the base of tree trunks, or floating lazily in the Saw Mill River, which snakes through Westchester on its way to the Hudson. 

On a recent afternoon, I picked up a plastic vanilla-flavored milk bottle called Core Power (can you feel the power?), by Fair Life, a can of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, an empty bottle of sparkling wine, and a Smart Water plastic bottle (how smart is it really, if it’s lying in the grit and dust?). I took them home for recycling. 

I’ve picked up cigarette butts all over town. They go in the garbage can in my kitchen. Various family members think I’m a lunatic. 

I wasn’t even trying that hard. If I wanted, I could have ranged father around town and found dozens of cans and bottles and hundreds of butts in the main business district, outside the restaurants and diners, the train station. The fields of stones bordering the commuter train tracks are filled with cans and bottles, but I can’t go there. It’s illegal, for one. Also, I don’t want to get accidentally electrocuted by the third rail.

If I ventured onto the eastern banks of the Saw Mill, no easy feat since it’s blocked by a major parkway, I could have retrieved a few more cans and bottles and picked up ribbons of fast-food wrapping paper scattered among the rushes of the river.

Our family has found in our backyard Diet Coke bottles, coffee cups, peanut butter cup wrappers, tortilla chip bags, plastic Easter egg containers, the leftover plastic skin of a mail package and a deflated helium balloon – things that have blown in off the street.

This is in a community of 7,500 people.  

Just imagine the haul I’ve gathered multiplied across Westchester and Putnam – the strip malls, interstates, gas stations, rest stops, schools, ball fields, and neighborhoods that make up the bi-county landscape. 

These products, emptied by their temporary owners, speak to me. They tell me something important about the people who possessed them for such a heartbreakingly short time.

They’re saying, “My person needed a fix. They needed it fast. Then they got rid of me. Threw me out of the car. Or tossed me over like I’m nothing to them now. Do you know how that makes me feel? I’ve been so used. Where is my home? Where is my mother? Who is my mother?”

Aside from my empathy for these young orphans loitering on the streets, this newly made trash tells me that their previous owners have no regard for their own home. 

The people throwing all this stuff away are telling me, “I don’t care about anything other than the next five minutes. I don’t care about anyone else either. Tossing away my can/bottle/meal wrapping/cigarette on the ground doesn’t affect me. In fact, it relieves me of the terrible burden of thinking about how to get rid of this annoying thing in a proper way.”

Cigarette butts invariably end up in storm drains, then rivers, finally, the oceans. One cigarette contaminates one liter of water, a habitat restoration manager from Riverkeeper, the Hudson River’s leading environmental guardian, once told me. They contain pesticides and trace amounts of heavy metals, including cadmium and lead, which can seriously damage your health.

As narrow as the Saw Mill River runs, mallard ducks like to swim in it. They dunk their shiny green heads underwater, sticking their backs up in the air right at anyone passing by, looking for something to eat, such as plants, or small fish. What kind of stuff is passing through their digestive systems and getting into their bloodstreams?

But people don’t see it, because they don’t want to see it. They don’t want to know about the damage they’re doing. 

Every piece of garbage I see on the ground affects me like sunburn. It’s as irritating as seeing any of the “Real Housewives” show up on TV at random moments. As long as we’re talking about plastic. 

Here’s a radical idea — how about we stop throwing our just-made purchases on the ground or in the water when we’re done with them? 

Recycle your metal cans. Metal can be recycled almost endlessly. Paper and cardboard can be recycled five to seven times. 

It’s not just a question of aesthetics. Every can, every piece of paper that’s recycled helps reduce carbon pollution. Even if it’s just a microscopic amount, it helps. It matters. 

Most people don’t know this, but even cigarettes, tobacco products, rolling papers and cigarette packs can be recycled. Smokers can put their extinguished cigarettes in plastic wrap and a box, then mail, them to a company called TerraCycle. The company will pay for the shipping. 

Terracycle hits the cigarette butts with gamma radiation to sterilize them and separates the elements of each cigarette – the filter, the paper and the tobacco. Then the company recycles the paper, composts the tobacco and pulverizes the shredded filters into powder, which can be used to make various plastic products, from chairs to park benches and industrial loading pallets. 

Plastic is not very recyclable, despite what Coca-Cola and PepsiCo say. But why toss plastic water bottles in the gutter? Why throw cigarette butts in the street? 

Is it so difficult to properly dispose of or recycle your trash? Does it really take that much time to care a little about what you’ve left behind? It costs nothing but is worth something – it’s a little bit of progress in preserving the home we all share.

Local writer Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union and other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary publication.