Garbage Is Garbage

Garbage is not only a problem for the world but my problem, too. Where I live in a condo that has "garbage cops", and they are apparently needed, I have been warned a number of times that my garbage is not good enough for the bins that are supplied. The problem is that garbage for one place is not the same as another. I have just moved and there is a lot of cardboard, plastics and paper involved in going from one place to another. I wish it were not so, but there it is. And it's a problem. In my previous domicile, I could put the cardboard cartons, folded of course, into the cardboard boxes bins. With a lot of online buying going on these days, it is not only helpful but essential to have such bins. My new domicile doesn't enjoy that luxury. Even tiny parcels come in either bubble wrap plastic envelopes or cardboard cartons. Cardboard if light, is permitted but the heavier kind is a no-no. There is a hierarchy of cardboard apparently. It entails a lot of garbage effort. Sorting the stuff is increasingly complicated and that is okay. We all care about the environment but when you are old, caring is a lot harder. For numbers of condo folk running off to the local recycle bins every few days, it is a fact that it, another kind of pollutant,  constitutes a lot of fuel use. Not too practical. In this smaller complex where I live now, newsprint is allowed but not the newsprint with no ink, just the printed kind of which we get far too much via the local newspaper. Most of the weeklies double the number of ads over any real news inside. Almost no one reads the stuff. It's another illogical waste of the environment that seems to go on and on and no one stops it. The first thing I do with that junk ad pile is to remove it without a glance and dump it into the mail room wastebasket. That basket is loaded every week. What a waste of waste. Must be "commerce" as an excuse. Then there is a plastics bin but only certain kinds of plastics are permitted. No plastic shopping bags are allowed. I thought that plastic was plastic and all could be recycled but for some odd reason, even though they are still used by grocers, those plastic bags are excluded. So what do we do with them? We use them as garbage bags and where do they go? They go into the real garbage, garbage bins.  That's okay with me, but it doesn't make sense when the same bags go off to a dump somewhere ( not in my back yard) and become landfill. What a way to fill our land! And then packers persist in using styrofoam in some packings. These are the lepers of the garbage world. No one wants them, nor do I, but there they are. I am not a driver of hither and yon. I have to drive to find where these recycling depots are and since I am an old gaffer, I am not about to search around from one street to another trying to locate these off-the-beaten-track places. I don't feel safe doing it. Boo hoo, you say, too bad, you use, you lose! No, I don't lose, I hire. I have to pay someone to take my garbage off to the recycling depot. And I am charged plenty. Once when my treadmill bit the dust, it cost me close to one hundred dollars for a young man to come and haul that off. Yet thieves rob the metal off gravestones. If an appliance goes, which is inevitable, that's an even bigger bill. The bugbear of my existence is devising ways of getting rid of things to suit the world before it gets rid of me.