I Inadvertently Moved Onto A Landfill

The realtor told me that the previous owners of my home were property managers who had been renting to college students attending the local community college. No problem. I was a college student not that long ago. I knew that there could be some bumps and bruises to the house but I wasn't all that worried about it. The property was large, lush and overgrown but, again, it was nothing I didn't think I could handle given enough time and effort.

What I was not expecting was the decades worth of garbage that was lurking just beneath the surface.

It seems as though the previous owners were partial to spending a lot of time outdoors drinking and that they had no concept of what a trash can, recycle bin or garbage receptacle were in any form. What I discovered under the surface of the overgrowth stunned me, then saddened me.

Litter bugs

As I began to clear the property I unearthed garbage. A lot of garbage. More garbage than I could conceivably have imagined beforehand. This was not simply some litter that had been left behind, this was can upon can upon can's worth of trash layered on the ground. Most of the trash was food waste and alcohol containers.

I found a bounty of beer cans. I dug up a windfall of wine bottles. There was glass and aluminum in equal measure. I found a luxury of liquor bottles. There was a representative from every alcohol group. Beer, wine, wine coolers, vodka, hard iced tea, hard lemonade, whiskey, bourbon, scotch, rum, tequila and brandy. They were all there, all sitting on the ground waiting for someone else to pick them up.

No worries. I can pick up bottles and cans and containers. Not a problem.

Then the next layer became apparent.

Under the first layer was another layer. The same representation of litter was here, again. But this time, the bottles were older. They were broken. More faded. More numerous. I frowned but was not to be deterred.

After another couple of weeks of intermittent garbage duty, I cleared the second layer...only to find another layer.

Unbelievable.

This time, the layer contained household goods. Bowls, cups, a bed frame, a bottle of screws, a stovetop. It looked as though a house had been destroyed and buried. Perhaps it had. Who knows?

Environmentalist to be

At first, I thought littering was rude because it caused people like myself to have to take time out of their lives to one day clean it up. It was paying labor forward, labor that usually costs very little to do in the first place but can add up over time. By refusing to simply put a can in another can, you are paying that simple act forward for someone else to do. With interest.

But then I saw how the trash was hampering the environment. My animals could not graze through the broken beer bottles. The grass struggled to push up through heavy glass wine jugs. The trees had a two foot layer of trash clogging their root systems. The litter was not just affecting the good natured sap who had to pick it up it was also hurting everything else around it.

To be fair, I was never a litter bug (other than the occasional cigarette butt from my smoking days which I told myself would dissolve in the next batch of inclement weather) but I had never paid much mind to the environmental movement. They seemed to make much ado about nothing.

But now I see what they see. A world filled with useless garbage. Littering is awful. The amount of excess trash we generate for a night of drinking is disgusting. This is a crisis!

So, I am striving to continue to scrape this property clean. At least, I can make one part of the planet whole once more. I am aiming to reduce my single use waste. I use Soda Stream. My kid wears cloth diapers. I know it is not much but after seeing how much waste one house can sit on, I can't imagine that on a planetary scale. It is sad.

I moved on top of someone's personal landfill and now I have to clean it up. At least it has taught me something along the way.