I remember in elementary school sitting on the floor of the gym/cafeteria/multipurpose room (remember those?) for an assembly. I don't remember the point of the assembly, but I do vividly remember a guy singing, "I'm just a cool guy, oh such the cool guy." Then, in my unwavering quest for elementary school acceptance saying, out loud, "Wow, he is cool!" Was it the Inspector Gadget thing he had going on? Fedora, sunglasses, long brown trench coat? I'll never know. Then he started taking newspapers and coffee cups and candy wrappers out of his bag and throwing them on the ground and - end scene. That's all I remember, like a half dream when you wake up groggy in the morning. There it is though, as clear as day, the beginning of my obsession with Trash.
Everything around us is in some form already trash. Either two minutes, two days or two hundred years from now it will eventually outlive it's viable use and will need to be discarded. Yet- we don't really think about garbage/trash/rubbish/refuse/litter in that way. Until recently, we rarely thought of trash at all. Trash is something you throw "away." But nothing really goes away. With a growing population, and a growing need for land to house and feed us, we also need space to put our waste.
Trash is quickly becoming Earth's most abundant resource and people are taking notice. In recent years, entrepreneurs, corporations, municipalities and individuals are creating solutions to reduce waste on the front end (manufacturing, packaging), innovatively reusing the waste we produce on the back end (recycling, upcycling) or not creating any waste at all (see "Zero Waste" lifestyle bloggers abound). Trash is coming to the front lines of environmental consciousness. It's time we had some Straight Trash Talk on how we make, consume and produce trash on a local and global level.
