Our most prized possession

Commentary by Chris Clegg

By nature, humans like to have possessions. Lots of them! We love our cars and we love our house. Men love their toys like quads, motorcycles and ski-dos and women love their jewelry. We spent tons of dough on the things in life that really don’t matter in the end. In our consumer market driven world, we spend, spend, spend. It’s a battle of the Joneses to see which family can have the most toys. Some even mortgage to the hilt to make sure their toy is a little bit better than the neighbours. Think people don’t? How many times have Mr. and Mrs. Snootyville built a little larger house, had a little bit bigger holiday trailer, or purchased that little fancier car for Sunday outings? Ah, but I digress. Sure, we spend on the things which give us the most pleasure. As humans in a rich society, we spend far more on recreation than most. Meanwhile, we also spend our fair share on other necessities like food, heating, water and sewer. What amazes me is how much we actually spend on garbage. That’s right, garbage. The stuff we no longer want, or have use for. Think about it. For residents in each town, most pay directly for garbage pickup. The $10 or $25 we pay each month seems like a little but did you ever stop to think about all the extra money we pay to dispose of trash? We have landfills all over. A fancy name for a trash collection place. It costs big dough to operate these places. In the M.D. of Big Lakes and other municipalities, we have smaller landfills which collect trash. Some of them forward trash (recyclables) to a larger facility called the regional landfill. We have three in the region: Widewater, High Prairie and Falher. Compared to smaller waste transfer stations, the regional facilities cost millions of dollars to build and maintain. This is the hidden cost of the price of garbage. If you think you pay $10-20 a month for garbage and that’s it, think again! What amazes me about our garbage is how much value we place on it. Think about it. We lock our garbage in the regional landfills like it was our most prized possession. We build gates around it to protect it, we place locks on it to keep people out and we even monitor some of the sites with video cameras. Sheesh! All this trouble to look after something we don’t want! All this trouble to look after a stinking, rotting mess or decomposing food and materials we toss away like bubbles in the wind. Of course, looking after garbage in regional landfills is not about tossing everything away. Many facilities have excellent recycling programs. And, we have to have some place to dispose of our trash. It just sees ironic we spend so much money on garbage. Years ago, landfills were unlocked. If anyone wanted to waddle down and sift trough the stinking mess looking for something to take home, they were more than welcome. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, they always say. And we do dispose of a lot of stuff others find useful. It is a shame. But all that changed one day when someone got hurt at a landfill. The lawyers got involved so today we lock our valuable trash because of liability issues. Who would ever think garbage was so valuable? Certainly not me!

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