Trash talking

Hayter article for February

“Can we talk trash?”

          Do you know what the most rapidly growing business in this country is? Banks? Well, they used to be. Several years ago, you could walk into a Burger King, and order a whopper combo and an adjustable mortgage rate in the same transaction.

            Then 2008, happened and while many bankers made a fortune selling bad mortgages. Obviously, I’m too dumb to understand the workings of all that, but I trust that somebody’s looking out for us now, even though banks are again swapping mortgages right and left.

            At the moment one good incentive for a cheap mortgage is to build places where people can store their stuff. The number of storage units in this country is multiplying at the same rate as surgical masks. In our neck of the woods,  areas are being cleared to make way for housing and storage units.

            Say, your parents die. The family divides up the good stuff and rents a couple of storage units to keep the things they hope to find a use for later. Do you have any friends or family members who have been paying monthly rent on storage units for years, just so they don’t have to give away stuff that they’ll never use? Eventually, the monthly cost of rent will be passed on to their kids who will inherit even more stuff that they don’t need but refuse to toss. It’s a financial perpetual motion machine.

            By the way, when Kay and I bought our house two years ago, our mortgage was sold one month after we moved in, and a big chunk of the land purchased to build the subdivision was used to build a massive storage complex. By the way, our subdivision and its streets have wooded names. “Forest lane, Timber Drive, Forever Woods… So, by purchasing my house, I am a part of our environmental problem, not our solution. In fact, I pretty much always have been.  I’m a human in the modern world. It requires a lot of energy and stuff to maintain a Mark Hayter.

            Speaking of which, Kay and I were recently trying to properly dispose of some of our useless stuff. A few years back, Kay got after me for throwing our spent batteries in with the household garbage. She reminded me that when chunked into a landfill, batteries can cause environment woes. So, Kay used her iron fist, to motivate me to collect a couple of quart-sized ziplock bags full of batteries used in our flashlights, remote controls, and all other wireless devices.

            Fortunately, we knew of a retail chain that collected old batteries. So, when the time came, we joyously took our stash to the store. It feels good when you go out of your way to do the right thing. However, the store manager kindly informed Kay that the establishment only collects rechargeable batteries. Crazy me, I don’t get rid of any of my rechargeable batteries until they fail to hold a charge, at which point they’re non-rechargeable.  While each of the batteries in my ziplocks failed to maintain a charge, none of them were included in the list of battery collectibles.

            When asked where we might take our batteries, the gentleman (Seriously, he was kind as could be.) informed Kay that he didn’t know. I don’t doubt for one minute that there are public places in The Woodlands and in Conroe that will take old batteries, but the more accessible they become, the more tax money they’ll need to get rid of the stuff. Hey, I’m American. I say just stick the stuff in the ground.

            Just in case there is a law against placing batteries into your household garbage, I want you to know that my exhausting detective work led me to the proper place for disposal. However, if there is no such law, I’ll have you know that I actually just tossed ‘em in the garbage. (NOTE:  There’s no need to ask me where the place is that might’ve accepted our spent batteries because they don’t take ‘em anymore.)

            To add to this environmental headache, our cities are having trouble selling their recyclable garbage. As you know, China is too upset at us to buy our trash. Unfortunately, businesses cannot cost-effectively handle recyclables. The solution would be for the government to provide financial incentives to trash buyers so they can affordably make products from recyclables.

            But, that would increase the public debt, which results in either the loss of other public services or an increase in taxes. Mark Hayter will not tolerate an increase in taxes to pay for stuff, so RECYCLABLE trash is being dumped into landfills where all the other trash goes. The only difference is, the recyclable trash is collected in different colored trucks that have cool environmental words painted on ‘em. Is this done in Montgomery County? Get real.

            It would be so much easier if the Federal Government took care of the collection and disposal of all the garbage in this country. As you’re surely aware,  Congress and whoever is in charge of the Executive Branch have agreed that increasing the national debt is no longer a concern. They even got Rush Limbaugh to drink the Kool-Aid.

            Our electorate has apparently also swallowed the debt theory feathers and all. By applying this new logic the DC can take care of all the trash in this country by simply adding the expense to our country’s rising debt.

            This idea will be known as our generation’s greatest invention. It ranks right up there with the idea of paying rent on a place to keep a bunch of the stuff we don’t use and passing the expense down to our kids. The hope is that there will come a time when a generation arrives that will take on the responsibility of changing our flawed logic. You apparently can’t depend on my generation to agree on a solution.

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