August 2025

Talking Trash: A Wrapper Finds Its Forever Home
By Teton Valley Community Recycling

You have just finished a granola bar. You crumple up the wrapper, drop it into the kitchen trash, and move on with your day. The moment feels small, but that wrapper is now beginning a long trip with a one-way ticket.

Depending on your household systems, this wrapper might find its way to the big trash can at the end of the driveway where RAD will pick it up in a trash truck. Alternatively, the wrapper might get to go on a fun drive in the family car to the Transfer Station. (This feels like a good time to mention that our “dump” is not actually a dump. It is a transfer station, or a middle stop in the waste world. Most of what arrives there does not stay, but instead gets sorted, packed, and shipped out.)

Anyways, the wrapper ends up in a huge bin with the rest of the household trash at the Transfer Station. When that bin is full, it is emptied into a semi-truck with towering steel walls holding between 14 and 22 tons of landfill bound waste. That truck’s destination is about 90 miles west of here at the Circular Butte Landfill. (If you read our column two months ago, you may recall that during a regular week in June 2025, Teton County, Idaho spent $24,800 to haul and dump our waste at the landfill. But we digress.)

At the landfill, the wrapper is unloaded into a vast pit. Compactors with spiked steel wheels crush and pack the trash into dense layers. A covering of dirt seals each day’s load, creating the stacked, buried history of everything we have ever thrown away.

For our granola bar wrapper, this is the end of the road. It will not break down or biodegrade in any meaningful way. This journey happens thousands of times a day with all the little pieces of waste we barely notice. Every time we choose to use less, reuse old things, or recycle, we change the ending of this story. We send fewer things on that long trip and save our community money in the process. 

Teton Valley Community Recycling (TVCR) is a local nonprofit working to reduce waste and promote reuse in our community. In this monthly column, we’ll share about waste management in the valley, along with practical tips to help you cut down on trash, save a few bucks, and rethink what we call “trash.” Have a topic you want to learn more about? Email us at info@tetonrecycling.org.

Stay tuned for more trash talk!