In alt.fan.miss-manners on Fri, 16 Apr 2004 02:45:03 GMT "Alan Bell"
posted:

We see a situation differently and would like to describe it to get feedback
from others.

We share a house with a large backyard. One corner of the backyard has a
concrete patio with two benches. One of us is concerned with plants,
gardening, conservation and recycling. That person ate an orange and
scattered nine pieces of the peel in a flower bed next to the patio. His
rationale was that the peels were biodegradable. The other of us is
concerned with rules, order and appearance. That person felt the orange
peels should have been placed in a trash can. His rationale is that the
peels are ugly.

You're both wrong. They shouldn't litter up a flower bed, and
they shouldn't be thrown away**. If you have a big yard, there may be
room for a compost heap.

**I throw such stuff away, and it doesn't bother me, but your friend
doesn't want to. OTOH, you can't make a compost heap from one orange
peel.

(Isn't there some other way to do this for small quantities, like
digging a hole, throwing the stuff in and refilling the hole? No one
ever suggests this and I haven't tried it.)

30 years ago, for reasons of helping Nature, I threw either a banana
peel or some eggshell behind some bushes at Valley Forge. I think it
was eggshell and people later told me that they didn't degrade well.
OTOH, the bushes were very thick and evergreen and I doubt anyone ever
saw the eggshell. So did I do the right thing or not? (Maybe I'll go
back and see if it is still there.)

FWIW, there are a bunch of woods behind my house, and kids used to sit
there sometimes at night and throw aluminum cans where they sat. I
clean that part of the woods (which is visible to no one without
working ones way through 50 feet of brush and woods) maybe once every
10 years, and for all that talk about aluminum lasting a long time,
after 5 years the cans have several holes in them, and I'm thinking
the whole can is thinner than it was.

We're cool and the best of friends. This didn't set off WWIII. But after
talking about it, we are curious as to what others think is proper. We tried
to put this into newsgroups that would tend to favor one and the other
position.



Meirman

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