So Much for Doing it the Right Way - Rant

Rennie Heuer

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Constantine, MI
I'm in a cleaning mood. For the past 3 days I've been cleaning the shop. I started with the obvious (floor, tools, etc.) but have now moved on to emptying every cabinet and drawer, getting rid of anything that I won't or can't use, wiping out the cabinet/drawer, and then putting everything back and marveling at all the free space I have.

Today was 'clean out the finishing cabinet' day. I was amazed to find that fully 75% of the finishes I was holding on to were not just past their usable dates, they were way past those dates! Some were hard in the can, some contained quantities so small I wondered why I held on to them. When I was done I was pleased I had freed up space and got rid of the unusable.

Now comes the hard part - what to do with ll that "hazardous material". I remembered some years back seeing separate dumpsters at the landfill for paints and solvents, so I checked their website for instructions. No note of solvent based finishes. So, I called. Good news - so long as I had less than 5 gallons total I could just bring them to the landfill.

So, I loaded up the car, drove the 5 miles to the landfill, pulled up the scale house, told the nice lady what I had and she handed me the normal number plaque, and told me to proceed. "Excuse me", I said, "where should I be taking this stuff?" "Oh, just take it down and throw it out in the regular dumping area", said she. I smiled sweetly as I rolled up the window, but I was fuming on the inside. Had I known that I would have simply put all this stuff in my garbage can and set it out on the curb - saving myself the half hour round trip and $4.25 in landfill fees.:doh:

So much for wanting to do the right thing.
 
And $4.25 for the gallon of gas. I applaud your efforts and sympathize with your luck. I have spent years struggling to do the right thing with waste without creating a larger carbon footprint in dealing with it than the waste creates all by itself. Finally, I live somewhere that makes it easy. One trash bin, one green bin and one recycle bin; if it can possibly be recycled, it goes in the bin. As to hazardous waste, I have lived where you just couldn't get rid of the stuff, had to drive somewhere, save it for the once a year pick-up and so forth. Where I live now you just call the week ahead, set it out with the regular barrels and someone following the "normal" trucks in a smaller truck, picks it up. They offer a similar service for mattresses, old TV's, nuclear waste, whatever; just call ahead and put it out there. . . . All the trucks probably go to the same spot at the dump and heave it in :rofl:
 
I think I am gonna be close behind you Rennie with the clean up. Comes a time we gotta all get real.
As to hazardous waste we have a special place to take it. No fees but they take all sorts of different categories of waste and recylce. From vehicle oil, cooking oil, batteries of any kind, pesticides, propane tanks even the little green camping units and on and on. Paint of all kinds and fluids of all kinds. Anything to keep it from sewers and landfill. But.....Joe citizen has to be prepared to take it in. They open on both days of weekend and all but two weekdays.

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I just pour mine over the back fence onto the neighbor's flower bed. Is that wrong? :rofl:

In my area of LA, they have dedicated hazmat drop-off sites, but they are not always open when I need them. (And the closest one is about 20 minutes away.) As a result, I have quite a collection of old finishes and such in my shop.


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