In Iowa: Too much stuff

My co-worker Liz Zabel reported a story in last Sunday's Gazette on all the places our trash goes in Linn County. It's a fascinating read.

Five hundred tons of garbage goes into the landfill at County Home Road in Marion each day. Google tells me that's the weight of about 100 elephants.

Five hundred tons equals about 4.5 pounds of refuse per Linn County resident per day. That's a lot of trash.

I didn't really appreciate how great our trash footprint was until I lived in Swaziland for two years while in the Peace Corps.

There was no municipal garbage service in my rural community in Southern Africa. Everything got reused. The alternatives were to burn your trash under your host family's watchful eye or collect it in your room, to cart sheepishly into town every few weeks.

It made me very aware of everything I threw away. I wasn't the only American I knew to dispose of an empty can, pile of old papers or frayed piece of clothing only to have someone else come along, pluck it from the trash heap, examine it and reclaim it for some purpose.

The empty can became a pot for a seedling, the papers were kindling for a fire and the clothing patched or resewn into something new.

I'm not advocating you start saving all your old clothes, cans and paper. That's a recipe for ending up on TLC's 'Hoarding: Buried Alive.”

But maybe we would all be better off buying less stuff to begin with.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as guilty as the next American of contributing to our throwaway lifestyle.

I order coffee in disposable cups and eat plenty of processed food in disposable containers. I get tired of things that have plenty of life in them and indulge in replacing them.

I just moved into a new house and in the process got rid of a ton of stuff. A lot of it ended up in the trash.

For my new house, built in 1915, I've made plenty of purchases and have been dismayed at just how much Styrofoam and plastic wrapping - neither of them recyclable - has packaged my new belongings.

But there's a reason I have cloth napkins instead of paper ones in my kitchen, a reason I keep canvas shopping bags in my car and adore all my secondhand dishes and furniture, collected over the years from relatives and thrift stores.

It's not just the stuff itself. It's the massive energy that goes into creating it. All those fossil fuels, burning up to create and ship our goods, are contributing to climate change in major ways.

I'd like my grandchildren to be able to visit a Florida not underwater and a California not parched from drought. From a totally selfish standpoint, I might want to retire to one of those places some day.

My cloth shopping bags might not make that big of dent toward fixing our massive climate problems, but at least I felt a little less guilty this Earth Day because of them.

I like to feel I'm adding a little bit less to the pile of stuff we're creating, one elephant's worth at a time.