Your tongue is designed — by God or evolution, I won’t fight you on that — to reside in a certain place in your body, and anyplace else you put your tongue, please note: you make this decision at your own peril.
I have from time to time been known to write an “Outsidah” column with a certain attitude, commonly known as “tongue in cheek,” and I confess, it gives me a certain amount of happiness — something approaching “glee,” I think — but there is always a certain inherent danger, because the tongue is not naturally designed for the cheek, and when the tongue is in that unnatural location, some readers won’t go there.
So today I was planning to write a column “tongue in cheek” about composting and recycling, and now that I’ve paused to think about it, I realize how foolhardy this was, not least because our local Ipswich recycling guru Paula Jones is a beloved friend of mine — and not only that, also a fellow Episcopalian — so anything I write about recycling is going to fall under her considerable and knowledgeable scrutiny, and if I stray from the straight and narrow, I’m going to hear about it at church. Which is like, the last place you want to hear about your straying from the straight and narrow.
My original idea was, I thought, quite amusing. This is what I was going to write, before I thought better of it:
I’m a dedicated environmentalist, I am passionate about preserving our planet, starting with our own little diamond-shaped 40 square miles of it, so in my own home, when it comes to disposing of stuff, there’s always the question of What should I do with this whatever-it-is?
I don’t have much bandwidth for the details, so I’ve developed a relatively simple six-point step-by-step checklist, which helps me process the processing.
Here it is. I hope it helps you also become a good environmentalist like me:
- What you can’t compost, recycle.
- If you’re not sure you can recycle it, eat it.
- If you’re not sure you can survive eating it, throw it in the yard and see if some other species will eat it.
- Next morning, if it’s still there, pull on some gloves (why risk contamination?), pick it up, put it in the trash, and let it become landfill. But regret it. (Skip the therapy; take it from me: Remorse is part of the process.)
- Remove gloves.
- To dispose of gloves, return to Step 1.
When I first came up with this checklist, I thought it was pretty funny. Which demonstrates just how low my amusement threshold is.
But then — thinking of my environment-angel Paula, and hearing her voice in my head — I paused, and went online, and sought to find out exactly what stuff in my house should actually be composted, and what should be recycled, and how, and when, and where, and why, etc., etc.
I googled “Ipswich MA composting,” and magically arrived at Ipswich.gov/273/Composting — and here’s what I learned:
In the little green cart that lives in my garage, thanks to the town’s curbside compost program, I can dump an incredibly vast array of organic junk: fruits, vegetables, raw or cooked. Stems, skins, pits, seeds. (Just remove those nasty grocery store stickers before composting.) Bread, grains, pasta, coffee grounds. (You can even compost that paper filter!) Dairy stuff, cakes, cookies, candies, gum, eggshells, eggs.
Lots of stuff is compostable! Leftovers. Spoiled food. Meat and bones, raw or cooked. Tea, tea bags. (Tea bags? Gah. Just remove the staples, please — ew!)
Seafood, including shells, raw or cooked. Nuts, nutshells, pits. Cooking grease!
Geez, visit the webpage for yourself. It’s like a Disney theme park ride. You can compost food-soiled napkins, paper bags, paper towels, paper egg cartons, paper towel tubes. You can compost chopsticks, toothpicks, pencils. Corks, hair, fur — even feathers!
Are you getting my drift here?
There is so much compostable stuff in your house, if you compost it all, you and your family will starve.
I mean, isn’t it reasonable to assume, if you have leftover cookies and candies, there’s some kind of domestic abuse going on?
Actually, there’s another whole composting category — stuff that has to go into a brown paper yard bag (flowers, twigs, house plants, blah blah blah) — but this just makes the webpage all the more fascinating.
This magical webpage (Ipswich.gov/273/Composting — did I say this already?) is also the place to learn about what you cannot compost: leaves, pebbles, milk cartons, cereal boxes, donut boxes, and the list goes on.
But it’s all so fascinating, I recommend you shut down your flatscreen TV for just one evening and do a deep-dive into Ipswich.gov/273/Composting.
It could change your life. And/or it could save the planet.
Or at least one small diamond-shaped 40 square miles of it.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road, about 98 feet from his beloved green compost bin. Follow Doug’s environmentalist shenanigans at Outsidah.Substack.com.
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