Garbage Day

The silence of a rain soaked street stirs to life as the afternoon garbage pickup comes growling along like some hungry metal monster, collecting hollow remains from homes across your neighborhood. You sit on your porch and watch the busy men manhandle green and brown barrels, wondering what eventually happens to the trash and recyclables, taken to some distant high-tech factory or smelly landfill. Garbage day is the day on which people place their garbage outside of their living quarters to be picked up by a waste collector and brought to a landfill. Waste is directly linked to human development, both technological and social. The compositions of different wastes have varied over time and location, with industrial development and innovation being directly linked to waste materials. Examples of this include plastics and nuclear technology. Some waste components have economic value and can be recycled once correctly recovered. Waste is sometimes a subjective concept, because items that some people discard may have value to others. It is widely recognized that waste materials can be a valuable resource, whilst there is debate as to how this value is best realized. Such concepts are colloquially expressed in western culture by such idioms as "One man's trash is another man's treasure." The European Union has started a discussion that will end in an End-of-Waste directive which will clarify the distinction between waste, which shall be treated for disposal, and raw materials that can be reused for the same or other purposes.