The problem with buying things is getting rid of things.
I just bought a new mattress, which meant I had to get rid of a mattress. I’ve done it before (I got rid of my husband’s bed after he died, among many other things), so I knew it could be done.
Short answer: The trash collectors will take it away if you put it out in the curb in a plastic bag. The bag is so that I don’t give the workers the bedbugs I don’t have.
Long answer: I had to order the plastic bag from Amazon, and pick it up from their drop-off center at Whole Foods so some idiot wouldn’t steal it from my front step. Then I had to wrangle the bag over the mattress, which was temporarily stored in my bedroom. This was not awful. I may be 74, but I can still manhandle a mattress as long as one part of it is still resting on something. My family comes over for dinner the night before trash collection, so I got my son-in-law to help me slide it down the stairs and out onto the curb. I put it flat on the corner so the trash guys would see it and so they wouldn’t have to drag it in between parked cars.
When I looked out in the morning, some officious neighbor had dragged it off the curb and leaned it against the wall of the house next door. I get it, a mattress on the sidewalk, even a twin, looks awful. But if it’s leaning against the house, the trash collectors will treat it as if it is invisible, so I dragged it over to in front of my house and leaned it against one of my planters, as a compromise.
Someone, of course, parked in front of the mattress (a nice couple in a nice little white car, I saw them doing it), but I was pretty sure the sanitation workers would still see it. I opened my front window shade and kept a wary eye on the front sidewalk, and when I heard the rumble of the truck, I peered out.
The worker grabbed my regular trash, eyed the mattress briefly, seized it in its nice new slippery plastic bag, juggled it briefly until he found the handles on the side, hoisted it in the air, dragged it across the hood of the nice white car, and flung it into the hopper of the truck. The truck roared off, the mattress half hanging out of the hopper, and disappeared at the end of the block. It was no longer my problem.
The plastic bag seemed to prevent the white car from getting scratched, at least I hope so.
I know that mattress, that carefully crafted padded object I have been sleeping on for some years (so long that there was a deep hollow in it), will be dumped onto a landfill. I know it will never really disintegrate, but instead will be covered by further fathomless strata of garbage, sharp objects, and clothing, while seagulls wheel overhead looking for good pickings. It may, at some point, be shoveled onto a barge and shipped off to a poor country where people looking for old electronics to be recycled for their chemicals will lift its soggy, fetid body up to look underneath. It may, at some point, even be burned, though I understand that in Philadelphia we reserve burning for the recyclables, a separate collection.
But I don’t know what else to do. Even if I got out my industrial-strength scissors and knives and dismembered the thing, I wouldn’t have any place to put it. Mice would build nests in the filling. It would get moldy, and smell bad.
If there was a nice mattress-recycling plant in town, I would hire a truck and take it there, but when I searched for companies like that, all I found was junk-removal companies advertising “eco-friendly” disposal, which is nonsense and means land-fills, because capitalism.
After the mattress departed my mortal sphere, I went out to see a movie, ate some popcorn, and bought some t-shirts, a book, and a nice journal. When I have stretched and stained the T-shirts beyond usefulness, I will put them out for a company that actually runs a thrift store and will pick them up for free, though I suspect they will throw my shirts into the ship-to-poor-country pile instead of reselling them. The book, I will put in the Little Free Library around the corner, where no one will take it and the owner of the library will eventually toss it in the trash. The journal, I will fill with careful writing in fountain pen, transcribe the bits I want to keep, and tear apart to recycle the paper and throw away the cover. I ate half the popcorn and put the rest in a solar-powered recycling bin.
Despite what the zero-waste people say, it’s not in my power to reverse the capitalist waste machine by my small efforts. I will have to own up to my complicity and acknowledge my frailty and moral flaws. As St. Paul said in the Epistle to the Romans, “For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.”
Anyway, the mattress is out of my house and not my problem any more, or my neighbor’s problem, for that matter. Whatever I am, however complicit I am, I’m not a land-fill.