This morning we ate our oatmeal. With flax seeds and walnuts and yogurt and prunes and for Steve, maple syrup. Real ample syrup. Some people from Vermont brought some up this past summer. I prepared the bread dough for its final raising before the oven and we talked about our plans for the day. I volunteered to take out the trash. Our trash consists mostly of food scraps and cans and plastic bags and cardboard boxes. Unfortunately recycling is not yet an option as Greenland is still burning all of their trash. It is cost prohibitive for the NSF to charter the NY Air National Guard to fly an annual estimation of 4 tons of waste back to the States. However, the NYANG does agree to fly it back to Kangerlussuaq from Summit Summit. I have just tried to give you a hyper link to Summit's own web page, complete with daily weather updates, by writing code. We shall see if it works. But I digress, the trash that Summit generates gets packed into a rectangular box built up on top of an air force pallet. The rectangular box has a lid. So on trash day you go around camp with a sled and collect all the garbage and then tug the sled over to the trash pallet where you try your best to cram it into all of the empty spaces inside the box. Once the trash pallet is full, we go through a process of removing the outer plywood form, drawing up the mess with cargo netting that has already been sleeved inside the box long before any trash was put in.This may sound confusing so I will make a short film of the transformation when we do it , which we will be doing soon as I can no longer fit down inside of the box to compact the existing trash.
The hardest thing about taking out the garbage is ignoring any whims to pilfer things. If you think it is expensive for the NYANG to fly trash home, think about how much it would cost us! Of course, we do recycle the things none of us could live with ourselves for NOT recycling like ink cartridges, batteries, aluminum and copper.
After taking care of all of my municipal duties, (power, water and waste) Steve and I went back into one of the three, 20 foot long, insulated, heated container vans to count widgets and bits.
It was a most remarkable day.
