North Channel Blog for Sunday July 24 2011
“What Is That Smell?”
To be frank, garbage stinks, no matter how you dress it up. You can hide it, spray it with floral mists, cover it up, mask it with layer after layer of plastic and still the one unsurprising fact of refuse remains: It stinks. If not immediately, then later.
Campers, boaters, RVers, hikers….all have differing methods of dealing with garbage. The rule is that you leave the area you are in just as you found it. Boaters have very stringent rules for disposing of refuse. “In the United States lakes, rivers, bays, sounds and three miles from shore, it is illegal to dump papers, rags, glass, food, metal, crockery and dunnage. For three to twelve miles from shore it is illegal to dump plastic, dunnage, lining and packing materials that float, also if not ground to less than one inch: paper, rags, glass, crockery, metal and food. For twelve to twenty-five miles it is illegal to dump plastic, dunnage, lining and packing materials that float. Outside the twenty-five mile limiti it is illegal to dump plastic. It is also illegal to any vessel to dump plastic trash anywhere in the ocean or navigable waters of the United States. Annex V of the MARPOL TREATY is an International Law for a cleaner, safer marine environment. Violation of these requirements may result in civil penalty up to $25,000.00 fine and imprisonment.” As you can read, the regulations are clear in their statement and intent.
So what are boaters to do? You carry your garbage with you until you can get back to a port/marina where you can properly dispose of your trash.
This makes for some creative solutions to containing the odors associated with trash. Larger boats are often equipped with trash compactors. We do not have one but even those that do still have to deal the trash issue when the compactor is full. We have settled on triple bagging the garbage and stowing it in the aft head. Inside the triple bags are numerous small bags, all tightly tied. Still, with all of that tying and “Ziplocing”, we are getting the faintest wafting of “ode de garbage”. Not bad, but there, nonetheless, as a silent reminder of what we ate and threw away.
There was a folk tune that I heard years ago on the NPR radio show, “Simply Folk”, entitled “Garbage, Garbage, Garbage”. I wish I had a recording of it. We have plenty of it. The composer could use ours as the inspiration for a sequel recording.
“Ancora imparo de garbage”
