Being both humdrum and unavoidable, garbage is the interface where everyone meets the environment as obligation. Many of us who were young during the 90s had a book detailing 50 simple ways to save the earth or similar and there are still plenty of examples of the genre: by sorting your trash, you, individually, are ameliorating toxic rubbish leaks, the ocean garbage patch, and the tragic circumstances of tiny children laboring in the dumps of poor countries. In fairness the 50 Simple Ways approach never took itself literally; after all, it isn’t new to employ hype copywriting to attract youth and vigor and most of all motivation to unconventionally attractive calls to action.

The more recent textual backlash to that shiny, recycling-based empowerment emphasizes that recycling, especially of plastics, is a lie; half of global greenhouse gas emissions are emitted by three dozen big companies; and private jets are responsible for more emissions than commercial flights. Even knowing that ethical consumption is not wholly possible under whatever we’re doing here, individual consumption is not completely divorced from corporate production, either, and community-level emissions being easier to intercept than private jets, we’re stuck with trash, Trisha.

In my city of about 17,000, outside the Donostia-San Sebastián metro area, they come right to your house to get your trash, and somehow that still makes people mad. You do have to sort your refuse for door-to-door: Monday is paper and cardboard, Tuesday is plastic and cans and milk cartons, Wednesday is food waste pickup or your neighborhood’s shared compost bin or if you have a garden, you can have your own household compost and the city will give you a bin and an augur for stirring. Saturday is actual garbage day. You put each day’s collection in a square bucket with a handle, or if it doesn’t fit, in a trash bag, and then you hang it on a stacked rack labelled with individual bar codes that is usually no more than a rainy sprint from your home. You can put cat litter and dirty diapers and maxi pads out every day. There is a big green container every few blocks for glass. There is a crap trailer for broken toys, unknown herbicides, burned frying pans, and old x-rays that is towed from neighborhood to neighborhood. Once a month is discarded furniture pickup day, and every few blocks there are little slotty boxes for used-up batteries and lightbulbs. There’s a dump just outside town where you also need to put your stuff in the right place but if you pay attention to the roving stuff days you can probably avoid ever going there. However the dump is also next to the best place in town to kayak so you might want to go anyway sometimes. 

The actual reason for the door-to-door program—the school-like routine, the warning X of shame, and the fines you have to pay if you get caught putting the wrong stuff out for collection—is to cut the amount of stuff that gets landfilled, and it works. This province had a 25% recovery rate for recyclable material about a decade ago. The government’s environmental authority reports that towns with a door-to-door program recover 60-80%, and the province as a whole has reached 52%. Towns that don’t have door-to-door have big color-coded containers and lower recovery; authorities claim that 90% of trash can be diverted from the landfill, but the EU goal is 50%. San Francisco has a similarly successful program, as does Ljubljana. 

Swift and victorious recovery is, in the incremental world of trying to get people to do stuff, exciting. It still, however, leaves an empty account of what happens after that. In Gipuzkoa, your recyclables are further separated by a private company and the reclaimable material is sold to a catalog of other private companies. There is a municipal composting facility, and the resulting compost is sold to landscaping companies. Everything that can’t be repurposed is then, and this is the controversial part, burned. The heat generated by the burning of garbage is used for energy, but there is also concern that the burning of trash, especially plastics, emits greenhouse gases along with carcinogenic compounds into the surrounding environment. The provincial environmental center (incinerator) was built at a cost estimated at anywhere between 770 million and over 1 billion euros, depending on how you count its financing. Landfills are contentious not only for the usual reasons, but for more immediately personal ones: in 2020, a landslide at a dump in the province to the east caused the deaths of 2 workers whose bodies were never recovered, even after months of excavation.

Substantial popular opposition to the incinerator has been ongoing, before, during, and after it was built and operational. Proponents of door-to-door say that it is the way to cut trash production to levels that would make both the incinerator and the landfill unnecessary. Thing is, once you get away from the publicly provided services—the trash pickup, the composting, the pre- and post-incinerator toxicology—it’s hard to find real data about what is going on. The companies that handle the trash after it’s collected don’t publish information about how much garbage is being incinerated, where it comes from, or how much of the material separated by users is ultimately recycled. Protesters who criticize the privatization of trash streams have a point: in addition to the predictable influence dealing and corruption of the sector, the lack of public data makes it impossible to know how much material from trash is really making it into the recycling.

My gramma was a young adult during the Great Depression and she hated separating her garbage. She generated very little waste and lived mostly off stuff she grew in her garden, maple walnut ice cream, and whatever government surplus cheese remained after we ate as much as we could. But she thought it was a big hassle to separate cans and bottles for recycling and I got the feeling she thought it was a thing you would ask poor people to do and those days were behind her, even if that wasn’t how others would have seen her. The people who hung trash bags on their balconies to protest the door-to-door system are probably also rejecting what they see as a servile responsibility, but sometimes they also oppose the left-wing party that supports it, EH-Bildu, which might be why their mad is madder than you’d expect. Until we have a real grasp about what happens to our trash, or until the wholesale re-design of consumer products makes it possible to reuse or recycle everything directly, and probably after that, there will be low-level trash separation conflict, because what else would we do if we can’t control anything else.