Trash

 People are pigs, and that’s probably not being fair to pigs.  After all, I’ve never known a pig to toss an empty Styrofoam clamshell container along with a plastic water bottle and a crumpled Doritos bag into the gutter, just two feet away from an overflowing municipal garbage can.

Humans do this all the time, though.  

Take an early morning bike ride through a part of your town where “nightlife” happens, and you’ll be shocked and shamed by the amount of trash strewn about everywhere: beer cans, empty pizza boxes, broken umbrellas, random shoes, chicken bones, Starbucks cups, t-shirts, socks, underpants and brassieres, even, McDonald’s bags, Burger King bags, Chick-Fil-A bags, grocery bags, plastic take-out food bags, a kid’s stroller, wine bottles, booze bottles, baby bottles, and disposable diapers, too, yuck!  And besides all this, if you live in a place where there’s regular trash pick-up, there will be piles of filled-up garbage bags filled up with all these things that are lying around unfilled-up, as well.

And that’s just one neighborhood, in one city or town, after one night!

Meanwhile, I make no claim to be any better.  Check out my garbage can, recycling bin, and compost container on Friday morning before the weekly pickup: broken dishes, soiled take-out boxes, empty yogurt containers, a pile of newspapers and magazine, discarded mail, rotten vegetables, a week’s worth of coffee grounds, socks and yes, underpants, too, sometimes, tied-up dog poop bags, busted picture frames and various indistinguishable shards of plastic, soon to be floating in the ocean somewhere.

And that’s just one household, in one city, after one week!

According to Wikipedia, an archeological midden, or old dump for domestic waste, “may consist of animal bones, human excrement, botanical material, mollusk shells, potsherds, lithics (especially debitage), and other artifacts and ecofacts associated with past human occupation.”

With that in mind, then apparently, the entire globe is a midden; the archeologists of the future will find our trash everywhere!