Where does the trash go?

#1 | Here's what a year's worth of trash looks like

For one solid year we did not take the trash anywhere. I made a mental note that it was September 2021 the last time Ben took some bags with him to town to dump with the farmer’s market trash (which is not allowed but technically possible). Then a whole year went by.

I asked everybody I could think of if they knew of a place where we could take our trash.

I was puzzled that Ben had no idea. Many times we had a conversation that went something like this.

Me: I don’t understand how you’ve lived here for 15 years but have no system for trash.

Ben: What do you mean? I have a system. Let the trash build up and then take it into town when I’m going in with the truck.

Me: Well there’s a ton of trash downstairs. When are you going to take it?

Ben: I don’t know. When I can. Just be patient. It will happen. Can’t do it now anyway, the truck is at the mechanic’s.

It’s true that the truck being with the mechanic was an issue. We didn’t want to pack the trash in with us and the kids in the Rodeo or the Montero (we drive a collection of old vehicles). The Toyota (the trash truck) was with the mechanic for nine months, which is a whole other story. But that wasn’t the only issue.

The real problem was that we had no official place to take it. We could not find the dump. Ben had gotten into some unpleasant interactions the last couple times he took the trash to town. His system of sneaking trash into the farmer’s market trash had seriously broken down.

Simultaneously our trash was building up.

We have a toddler who is still in diapers. I wish I could report that she’s mostly worn reusable diapers. It is a little tender for me to admit that we’ve used almost only disposables.

Before Lia was born I imagined that I would be a cloth diaper kind of mom. When I was pregnant I spent time researching cloth diaper systems and invested money in a set-up for a newborn. After Lia was born I tried to use them with her, but I couldn’t make them work.

I don’t know if I bought the wrong kind, or if there’s some secret I couldn’t figure out, or if having a child in cloth diapers is just a big freaking mess no matter what, but every time Lia went in her cloth diapers I’d have to change her whole outfit.

Ben, the man who named his farm Ecojoya, just observed, chuckled, and said, “yeah, we tried that with Ian too but disposables work a lot better.” I could sense he would not be much help in any cloth diaper endeavor.

With Ben’s attitude and the rest of what being the mother to a newborn entails I just resigned in my heart to not being a cloth diaper kind of mom. Huggies kept her clothes dry, and her skin. I’m explaining all of this so you know what was in the trash.

Dirty diapers, plastic food wrappers, chicken bones we didn’t want the dogs to get, and whatever miscellany that we could not recycle filled trash bag after trash bag. 

I was adamant about sorting out the recycling. I had found a place to recycle. One time when I was dropping off the recycling I asked a worker there if he knew where I could take the trash. My Spanish got me far enough to ask the question, but then he gave me directions and all I could catch was the name of the general area and that I was supposed to turn at a restaurant. This was early on in my search for the dump and I felt good about it. All I would have to do is bring Ben to the recycle place and have him ask the question, he would be able to understand. But for some reason that never worked out. 

Ben had one of the workers build a shelf on the side of the driveway where we could stack trash bags, because up until then the trash was just sitting on the patio. For a while this helped, but then the shelf became too full and we went back to stacking trash on the patio.

At one point during the year an English-speaking couple, Mateo and Kristina, moved up above us on the mountain. We would see them riding their motorbike up and down and we started to get to know them a bit. One day I went to town with Kristina and on that drive the topic of trash came up. She told me that she had been to a dump with Gabriel, our neighbor. She described it as a place where they weigh your truck when you pull in, you dump, and then they weigh you again so they can charge you for what you dumped.

This made me happy. Again I thought we were narrowing in on where to take the trash. Kristina didn’t know the location of the dump, only that it wasn’t too far away. I thought it would be simple, Ben could ask Gabriel. 

But Gabriel doesn’t have a phone, so you have to catch him when he’s going by on his motorbike. And when I say you, I mean Ben. So it took a long time for all the circumstances to come together so I could remind Ben to ask about the dump when Gabriel was going by.

I guess you can begin to get the idea that the trash was a problem for me, but not such a big one for Ben. He had other things on his mind and has a high tolerance for living in disarray. Plus he thinks almost anything could be useful later so I’m never sure what is trash and what is not.

Perplexingly, it turned out that Gabriel had no satisfactory answer to this question. I can only surmise that he was being purposely unhelpful. He told Ben he didn’t know where to take trash. I believe that Kristina went with him to the dump. I don’t know why he couldn’t confirm it existed. But that’s what life is like here for me. It’s happening in a language I don’t understand well and often with people I’m not sure I can trust.

The Gabriel encounter wasn’t that long ago. Within the last year I have also consulted the English speaking community group in my area on Facebook, which is my go-to for figuring things out most of the time. Literally no one had any idea where to take trash, or if they did, they did not comment. I did find the recycling place this way.

I also asked my Mexican friend Ana who is obviously fluent in Spanish, owns a restaurant in town, and is pretty much as capable in Costa Rica as I would be back in the U.S. She told me that when she has a bag of trash at home she brings it into town and puts it with the trash at her dad’s apartment. So, not helpful for me.

But that’s the thing. There is trash pick-up in town. I’ve gotten stuck behind the dump truck before as it stops at curb after curb picking up the trash. I’ve imagined getting desperate enough at some point to drop whatever I’m doing the next time I see it and follow it all the way to the end of its route.

But what do we do with our trash up here on the mountain? What does everyone else do, you may ask. 

Everyone else burns it. The smell of burning plastic is familiar around here. At Ian’s school there will be the occasional lazy fire burning in the schoolyard with a bunch of cookie wrappers fluttering around it in the wind when I go by.

I just can’t burn plastic food wrappers and dirty diapers. I need them to go away. I’ve never had to think about trash so much before. Do you think about your trash and where it goes? Do you know how amazing it is to have someone come to your house once a week and take your trash away?

I asked Ben if we could make our own landfill at the farm. There’s 20 hectares, it’s a lot of land. I think a lot of farms have their own dumps. But of course that would also be sad. Making a dump on the land. 

But that’s always the truth, isn’t it. It’s always sad to have to make a dump on the land. I’m so used to my trash just disappearing somewhere else. Having to watch it build up over the course of the year, having to reconcile with the gross stuff we create and need a place to throw, it’s been a trip.

Last week Ben was in town and he asked the right guy at the right hardware store where we can take the trash. He sent me a pin on a Google Map. When I looked I saw that it was basically called “Solid Waste Transfer Station” aka the dump, just in Spanish. If I’d known what to type into Google I could have found it ages ago.

This does not explain why almost nobody else knows the dump exists. 

The truck is finally fixed and yesterday Ben and one of the workers put the whole year’s worth of trash in the truck and it got taken to the dump. It cost 13,000 colones to dump at 38 colones per kilo. This means there was 342 kilos or 753 pounds of trash.

When I look at it all in this picture I think maybe we’re doing ok. If this is a year of trash for our family during a time when one of us is in diapers, perhaps we are not treading as hard on the Earth as we could be.

I don’t know. I still want it to be less.