The trunk of our car is always overflowing when we pull up in front of our house in Baltimore.
Overflowing with boxes of vegetables from our garden?
Sometimes.
With coolers full of delicious leftovers?
Occasionally.
With gallons and gallons of freshly pressed apple cider?
Soon, hopefully.
Actually, our greatest and most consistent import from Perry County is good, old-fashioned, one hundred percent genuine American garbage.
In big plastic bags.
When we first arrived on St. Peters Church Road, we asked our neighbors a natural question: what day is trash pick-up?
That’s when we learned that there was no regular trash pick-up. There was trash collection, but it was pay-as-you-go. We could buy the distinctive blue trash bags at the East End Market in Landisburg.
“Great idea!” I thought. Pay-as-you-go encourages recycling, and discourages the Culture of Waste that Plagues our Society.
(You can tell I’m thinking globally when the capital letters start creeping in.)
Of course, I was a little worried about setting those thin-skinned blue bags out with all the raccoons, possums, skunks, crows, and vultures. Not to mention the odd black bear.
Still, I approved.
There was one little hitch: the blue bags cost money. Whereas trash pickup in Baltimore was free. If by “free” you mean one of the few benefits of paying thousands of dollars in taxes every year for skimpy city services.
So, like the cheapskates—I mean, like conscientious hikers and hunters everywhere, we started packing out our trash.
As the years rolled by, we discovered two more interesting facts about waste disposal in Perry County. First, people liked to burn their trash. Second, people liked to scatter their unburnable trash on the land.
We learned that Shermans Creek (and by the way, from now on, I plan to call it “Shermans,” with “s,” regardless of any federal database. So there.) was historically a great informal dumping ground. You wouldn’t believe how much crushed glass and rusted baling wire there is along the shore, not to mention the larger concentrations of antique garbage on the steep banks where truckloads were tipped for decades.
We live in a much more enlightened era now. No one would think of simply dumping tons and tons of garbage in a creek or on open land, where it could poison the soil and contaminate the groundwater.
Except maybe the owners of the blue bag company, Dynamite Disposal, who, between 1993 and 2007, illegally dumped an estimated 41,000 cubic yards of waste on company property.
Imagine our surprise when we learned that the clever pay-as-you-go system was actually a pay-me-to-litter-on-an-industrial-scale system.
Lately I’ve been wondering why Perry County lacks a municipal dump. Wouldn’t that have been the sensible and responsible way to handle citizens’ waste from the start?
I can already hear the echoes of a hundred contentious town meetings. Municipal dumps are expensive! How do you expect to pay for something like that? Not with taxes, I hope. Taxes are always and forever bad. Why should we expect the government–even our trusted local government–to outperform the private sector?
Let me put it this way. The owners of Dynamite Disposal have been fined 5.7 million dollars by the Department of Environmental Protection and have been ordered to clean up their mess.
So far, there’s been virtually no clean-up, and the owners are crying poor.
Who do you imagine is going to get stuck with the bill for the clean-up?
That’s right. Responsible taxpayers.
And it’s going to cost a whole lot more to clean up that criminal mess than it would have cost for a sensible municipal waste management solution in the first place.
I believe there’s a place for government, especially in protecting the land and water we all share. Some day, perhaps, we’ll be able to drop off and recycle our waste conveniently and safely in Perry County.
Until then, we’ll be taking our stinky business to Baltimore.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 08 October 2009
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
