“Whose trash is this in my trashcan?”
The outburst erupted from my neighbor, whose office is just across the hall from mine. My hallmate is typically kind, reserved, and polite. But not today.
“Look at this stuff in my trashcan! Who has the right to dump their stuff into my trashcan?” She was furious at the fact that someone, apparently walking down the hall and in need of disposing of rubbish, spotted her trashcan just inside her unlocked office door and discarded unwanted items in her personal trashcan.
I had never before pondered the concept of personal trash, especially when the offices are housed within a state agency.
On the other hand, maybe working in a state agency adds legitimacy to the notion of personalized trash. Perhaps, since none of us owns anything in the building save the clothes on our back, our trash becomes a desperate expression of our individual identities.
So—perhaps there should be a certain sense of injustice when someone disposes of something in our trash can without permission, mingling their unapproved garbage with our own. Sure, in a sense we’ve already disowned our trash by disposing of it in the trashcan, but just before that, darn it, it was ours! We had the power to choose whether to keep it or lose it; we enjoyed total dominion over it while it was still ours. It was our gum wrapper wrapped around our discarded gum that we chomped like cud all the way to work after the near-mishap with the eighteen-wheeler on the freeway. It was our own t-shirt, shredding from wear, that we had worn to the concert with that special someone who broke our heart; when the arm pit fabric ripped at work, we covered ourselves in a too-warm sweater as we grieved and fended off quizzical looks from our coworkers the rest of the day. It was our broken porcelain mug from that once-ever trip to Prague that fell off our desk and shattered.
And now our sacred trash is being spoiled by fabric-staining used tea bags and filthy scum-soaked paper towels. What gives them the right?
To be fair, there was nothing sacrosanct about my hallmate’s trash. Had we been in India, it would have qualified in the lowest-caste variety—the “untouchables” of the trash heap. It held no higher pedigree than the vagrant off-cast that she deemed had polluted her own particular rubbish. Sure, there might be a gaping hole in the logic of personalizing discarded waste, but somehow, the co-mingling of deposited trash can rile us.
The “not my trash” movement has finally made it into the office building. For decades, we’ve managed to avoid the personalizing of our own trash by exporting it all over the globe for disposal. Let Thailand take our toxic rubbish, whether computer monitors, decrepit cell phones, or toys gently emitting low levels of radiation into the cribs of unsuspecting babies. Bare-footed men on the coast of Bangladesh bust up our rusty old retired marine vessels, recycling their carcasses, eventually to create brand new ships. Let somebody else die from this dangerous and polluting stuff instead of us!
This morning, when I arrived at my office and the fluorescent lights flickered alive, I realized with a start that the “not my trash” anthem had taken a shocking and unwelcome further advance—it had entered the bowels of my own office.
There before me—in my own circular trashcan—lay the hideous vulgarity of Not-My-Trash! At first, all I could feel was the obscene sense of having been personally violated by an unapproved discard. What could it be? Loathsome, unidentifiable green scum from an ancient lunch bag discard? The disposed carcass of a squashed cockroach? Plasticized remains of melted and reconstituted petrified Jujube candies?
I moved closer to my trashcan, squinting through half-closed eyes to dilute the grisly vision of what illegal trash dumping I would identify.
And—there it was—something I did not expect. A handsome Starbuck cup with striking green logo, barely used, stared back at me from the bottom of the trashcan. It was a high-class discard, having only recently treated its former owner to a five-dollar-and-change extravagance on the way to work. Inwardly, I writhed in embarrassment. It was a good and honorable discard; I wondered if I could provide the same sense of joy to someone today, a joy that this disposable cup of java had already contributed.
It was time, too, for my hallmate to learn the lesson that I had just learned—that all trash that’s not my trash is not bad trash. It, too, used to be somebody’s treasure.
So I did the only reasonable thing. I gingerly picked up the Starbuck’s cup and went to the hallway, checking both ways to be sure no one observed me. Then I carried it across the hall and dropped it into my hallmate’s trashcan.