Banning Straws, Plastic Bags and Syrofoam Containers in Jalisco

sm1mex wrote:Right.  Paper garbage bags would get messy from left over food scrapes.

Leftover food scraps should be composted.

If you're old enough, you may remember a time before plastic bags. Somehow, people dealt with their garbage. My recollection was of the family putting a large metal garbage can out in front once a week for pickup, after which the can was hosed out. This was in Los Angeles, CA.
Any reason this can't happen here?

That's essentially what some of my Mexican neighbors do except they use plastic paint buckets and empty daily. Problem is, if they just put the bucket down on the corner with all those kitchen scraps and bones and tortillas the animals are immediately into it and spreading it around.

Perhaps a covered garbage can on your property until time to have it hauled away, then uncover and put out on the corner and hope someone doesn't steal the can before you can reclaim it.

Then, as Gringal said, hose it out and start over.

That is the correct solution. When I was a kid in the last century, that is exactly what my parents did

suegarn wrote:

sm1mex wrote:Right.  Paper garbage bags would get messy from left over food scrapes.

Leftover food scraps should be composted.

When I was a kid no garbage problems......
Dogs and cats got the high end food scraps, the hogs got the rest, including peelings or anything the former wouldn't eat. Most staple items were packaged in tin or paper, like oatmeal, flour, coffee, etc., etc. Meat was packaged in butchers paper.  Tin, paper, and glass were put into paper grocery bags and tossed into ravines to rot and decompose.
I know I'm old but plastic changed all that.

Very true! I remember meat in round, white & stiff paper containers with fitted covers. They were lightly waxed, but they still burned or were taken to the 'dump' to decompose. There was no garbage disposer in the sink, but we had dogs and cats, and us kids. I do not remember much of any garbage that could not end up in the garden in short order.
Cloth was natural then, until nylon was invented. Now, most 'cloth' is actually plastic too. Toys? They were also tin and iron, without batteries. They either wound up, or they were electric trains, which ran on a transformer's DC current. When they failed, they eventually rusted away without polluting anything.
Living in the country, on a dirt road, with active family farms in the immediate neighborhood, we were aware of everything from birth to slaughter, with milking and fertilizing of fields being just as natural.
Before we were old enough for high school, we knew how to drive tractors, trucks, horses and even cars, shoot squirrels, rabbits and doves, and even use dynamite to blast drainage ditches, stumps and boulders.
Life was definitely different before plastic.

[/quote]Leftover food scraps should be composted.[/quote]

Yes, they should but without the sufficient outdoor space I do the next best thing - I save a bag of produce scraps and trimmings in the freeze and once a week I cook it all down and feed it to the dog. Being a veg, I have an endless supply of produce trimmings and dog is very happy.

As an aside, I do remember how skanky our hosed out metal garbage cans smelled.

I remember being surprised to find wax paper products in the local markets when i moved here. We may be seeing more of it in the future. My guess is that the alternative products will be available at the same place you now buy plastic bags and such.

I believe California has a statewide ban on plastic bags. San Francisco and other cities have even more extensive restrictions on disposable plastics. How's that working out? Anyone know?

I remember having a 45-gallon metal drum in the backyard that my father would incinerate all of our non-recyclable garbage in. Obviously, food waste, paper, grass or leaf waste....all of that would go in the compost pile. Glass jars and metal tins would be picked up by the scrap man in his truck. And glass pop bottles were a childhood dream! We'd walk along and collect all the bottles out of ditches alongside the roads, then take them back to the corner store and buy candy or comic books!