Styrofoam
For a whole week now, I have been volunteering at a local elementary school during lunch. This is to pay my debt to society for speeding in a school zone. Fitting, isn't it? Anyway, I've been working with two lunch ladies and two 4th grade girls. We serve lunch. It's not too bad but it is kind of ironic that when I was IN elementary school, I NEVER ate school lunch. I was way too finicky.

There is, however, a disturbing element... When I was in school, we had big plastic trays with divisions in them for different foods. At the end of lunch, we would walk past these big trash cans, shake our trays off into them, and throw them in a big sink. Behind the big sink were two lunch ladies who had big hoses that came out of the ceiling. They'd hose off the trays and put them in some kind of steamer cabinet for a while, then make new stacks out of the clean trays.

At this school, they use STYROFOAM versions of the plastic trays. About 75 kids have breakfast, and about 225 have lunch, which equals roughly 300 kids a day. Times 5. That's 1500 styrofoam trays per week. And they're just thrown out in the trash, of course!

I am not a recycling nut. In fact, I'm not good at it at all. I admit to throwing the occasional soda can in the regular trash and I'm not that good with newspapers, either. Forget about the frozen food packages and stuff. But I do exercise restraint in a few places...like, I don't use paper towels to dry my hands at home, I use dishtowels. Anyway, even I am appalled at the amount of waste generated at this school. Truly appalled.

There's a huge trash dump on the route from this town to the first respectably large city. From the road, you can see it looming in the distance, and the displaced seagulls flocking around it. Now I know what it's made of.