I recently returned from a trip to San Francisco. Now, I love San Francisco just like most neo-hippies do, but I do not think that it is the perfect city like many will profess (If I did, I would live there). I say this so that you don’t think that I’m one of those girls on a bandwagon about how San Francisco does everything right. Believe me, I am not that girl. However, the city has nailed one thing fabulously: They’ve found a way to make residents think about landfill size every single time they throw things away.If you’re not up on San Francisco environmental policy (and I was not), the city is working towards becoming a zero waste city. Part of this effort involves mandating composting. As part of that effort, most residential and business buildings (including movie theaters, which I thought was awesome), have implemented new, color-coded trash containers. Blue is for recyclable items like cans and plastics. Green is for compostable items. And black, black is for “landfill” items.
That’s right. The vast majority of the new “trash” containers don’t say “trash.” They say landfill. And that may seem like a fairly insignificant thing. It’s just a word, right? Except that it’s not just a word. When you take an item and throw it into a container that says “landfill,” you aren’t given the luxury of not having to think about where that item will ultimately end up or how it will impact the planet. You are slapped with it right in the face – this item is going to add to the amount of non-biodegradable material taking up space in landfills.
Nicely played, San Francisco. This is a technique that could work well outside of the ultra-green tendencies of a city like San Fran. Part of getting people to change behaviors is getting them to understand and internalize the impact. Much like we don’t understand food sources because we no longer see animals or fields of wheat daily and instead just see grocery store aisles, the impact of landfills isn’t something intimate to our daily experience. But forcing us to be aware of and acknowledge the issue every time we casually throw something away, that would at a minimum begin a process of planning the though that “waste doesn’t just disappear” into the minds of America.
It’s a movement we can hope catches on – the idea of not thinking of trash as “trash” but instead thinking of it as “an item in a landfill that I personally put there.”
What is not trash is Facebook, and we’d love it if you took a moment to like Tiny Green Bubble on Facebook for more tips on green living.
Photo credit D'Arcy Norman on Flickr Creative Commons
