Considering the debate raging in town, I thought this might be of interest to you-all, or at least some of you.

I just wanted to mention a change in my life that I made as a result of this list. Due to this series of postings by Kathleen, I learned about the garbage hauler in my new neighborhood, Waste Management, and what they do with my garbage (poison my neighbor's groundwater). So I decided to try to live without generating garbage. When I bought my house, I didn't initiate garbage service, and I just take everything myself to the recycler about every 2 months. In contrast to limited curbside service, when I take it there, I can recycle almost everything imaginable, and compost the rest. It is amazing!

I've only been successful at this in my home life. As a doctor, I create garbage - I can reduce it, but not avoid it. And I really don't know what happens to that biohazard box when it leaves my line of sight - probably something pretty awful. BUT I'm still thrilled with how relatively easy it was to make this big change in my household.

As most modern people are highly skilled at "doubling," or denying (receiving information like this, and going on with their lives as if they hadn't), I wanted to present the steps that helped me stop my denial and act.

I was primed to make this decision by two factors. One, I had recently come from living on an island in Nicaragua where there is no recycling. The fact of being on a little island forced me to come to terms with what was happening to my garbage. The only options were for me to personally burn it or bury it (i.e., breathe toxic fumes or have it seep into my water) or to take it to "the dump" which was just a place where people's garbage got thrown - no hole, no burial, no nothing, and so it just blew all over the place for miles in every direction. I was unable to live anymore with the denial that is facilitated by the magic truck that appears each week for us urbanites and hauls everything away to some unknown place - something I knew in the back of my head wasn't great, but is very different from physically confronting the reality. It was the first time in my life that I actually saw where all my garbage went.

After a while, I made radical changes in my consumption - I tried to stop buying plastic completely, which was difficult because disposable culture has definitely invaded Central America (there is a joke that the plastic bag is the national flower of Nicaragua, because it's such a common roadside sight). So, I had already become mindful about my trash to a high degree.

Second factor was that I already knew that Waste Management, Inc. is involved with shady deals all over the world (they are even mentioned for the juicy contract they got in Saudi Arabia, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which I recommend everybody on this list read). So, I didn't want to give them money (or garbage to deliver to my neighbor).

There is a mindfulness exercise where you carry around all the garbage that you create for a couple of days (I've never done this, but I've heard of it). This approach is a little bit like that - I actually get to see all my recycling building up and I get to see how much junk I really generate over time - because of course it's better not to consume any of that in the first place than to recycle it, and this provides a good visual incentive. So I look at everything I'm buying, and think about what will be entailed when it leaves my life, as well as what it took for it to be offered on the shelf for my consumption, and think about whether I really want to encourage those events to repeat themselves.

I know that personal lifestyle changes are not the whole story, and that organizing together against abuses of power by corporations like Waste Management is even more important. But, I wanted to thank you, Kathleen, for inspiring mindfulness and change on my part.