VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY:Recycling: A primer

Our house is like a roach motel for paper. Once a magazine, book or piece of paper checks into our house, it never checks out. This is part of why Vic and I produce only about 16 pounds of trash each per week.

In comparison, the average American produces 31 pounds of municipal solid waste per person per week. However, that figure includes waste produced at work as well as at home.

About 22 pounds of our trash is newspapers. We dump them in the trash and let Rainbow Disposal recycle them for us. But we recycle our aluminum cans and plastic water bottles to collect the cash.

Part of our secret for low trash production is that we have two backyard composters. Most of our household food waste and yard waste goes there. Researchers sorting through household garbage and comparing the findings with grocery store receipts from those households found that the average family throws into the trash an annual total of 470 pounds per household, or 14% of all food brought into the house. This isn’t counting what goes down the garbage disposal or is fed to the family dog. Composting can reduce the amount of food waste that goes into the trash or down the disposal.

We keep two plastic containers on our kitchen counter for green waste such as vegetable and fruit peelings. No grease, meat, dairy products or eggshells go into the compost bins. I collect several garbage bags of leaves from our deciduous trees in the fall and store them in back. Every time we dump a load of green waste into the composter, we add a layer of dry brown leaves, and water the pile. Every month or so, we scrape finished compost out the bottom door of the composter and spread it on the yard.

Currently, Huntington Beach residents are allowed to put out as much waste as they like, but that will change when Rainbow Disposal implements its new pickup system. We’ll need to sort our trash and we will be limited in how much we can throw out each week. Vic and I decided that it finally was time to do something about the accumulating things in our house before we’re restricted in how much we can set on the curb each week.

Part of our problem of accumulating stuff was merging my mom’s household goods with ours. When my mom died a year ago, we gave away much of her furniture, appliances and other household items to her grandchildren, the Salvation Army and the Orange County Conservation Corps. We put some of her furniture in our living room. However, there was still an unbelievable amount left over. Needing to clear out her apartment, we simply moved the rest of mom’s things to our house and garage.

I was too distraught to deal with it immediately. When our son Bob died three months later, I found it impossible to go through my mom’s things. Every time I tried, I found a picture of Bob or a letter from Bob. So the boxes and sacks sat right where we put them last September.

A few weeks ago, I decided that it was finally time to deal with the mess. Vic and I watched a few episodes of “Clean House” on television, became inspired and set about transforming our rat’s nest of a house back into suitable living quarters.

In two weeks’ time, we’ve given books and clothes to charity and thrown out untold amounts of old papers. Vic bought six new shelving units and assembled them in our garage office. Stuff went into boxes and boxes went onto shelves. Our living, dining and family rooms were returned to functionality.

Inspired, we set in on our guest room/library/office. We plan to reorganize our respective individual offices next. (Yes, we have four offices in our house.) It’s like getting religion. We now want everyone to experience the joy of recycling unused, unnecessary stuff instead of hoarding it.

To temporarily escape the madness of house cleaning, I went to Coastal Cleanup Day at the Bolsa Chica on Saturday. (I hope you see the irony in that.) There, hundreds of people were pulling literally tons of weeds and trash out of the Bolsa Chica habitat areas.

Rainbow Disposal donated a large blue dumpster and three smaller Rent-a-Bins to the effort. It’ll recycle the green waste and any other recyclables that it can pull out of the mess.

With the help of volunteers from Boeing, Sempra Energy, and other groups, the Bolsa Chica Conservancy filled a six-ton dumpster with ice plant, Russian thistle, a sofa cushion, various car parts, 2,500 cigarette filters and other assorted items that don’t belong in a nice habitat. They had to stomp down the bags to make room for more.

The Amigos de Bolsa Chica had 146 volunteers who logged in 438 hours of volunteer time, not counting the time for coordination, setup and breakdown of the tables and canopies. They filled two Rent-a-Bins with trash. The Bolsa Chica Stewards worked on the mesa.

The bottom line is that we all have too much stuff and we generate too much waste. See how you can reduce the amount of material that goes into the trash stream. Reuse or recycle it if possible, and dispose of it properly otherwise.

For some trashy facts, visit www.epa.gov/msw/facts.htm/.