This Aintarctica

Revolt of the Little People

It’s really not that complicated, but when it comes time to throw away your trash it gets complicated. In real life, meaning life North of the Equator, trash is a chore. Simply taking it from your kitchen to the garbage can outside and then to the curb every Thursday seems like a minor household task. In Antarctica, it can take 20 minutes to unload a trashcan the size of a five-gallon bucket.

Our dorm rooms are too small to have several trashcans lined up against the wall, so we throw all of our waste into one basket and when the trash is full then we take it down the hall and “sort our trash.” At the end of the hall there are rows of trashcans with labels like paper towels, glass, aluminum, Non-R (Non-Recyclable), Biowaste, Food Waste or Plastic. At this wall we reach into our trashcan and pull out each piece of trash, one by one, and throw them into their appropriate receptacle. Some things like an aluminum can are obvious other pieces of trash take time. Like Q-Tips? It could be biowaste if it was used to clean your ear, but what if it was used to clean your computer screen? Does it belong in plastics if the tube is plastic or paper towels if the tube is made of paper? Paper towels are the bottom of the recyclable paper chain and will just get burned, so I throw Q-tips with the towels. But what if a towel is covered lightly in food? Food waste or Paper Towels? It all depends if the food will spoil. Spoiled food goes into food waste.

As we throw away our trash it’s like doing a forensic analysis of the last few weeks of our lives. Letters from home, condoms, tampons and Kleenexes, it’s our diary of life in Antarctica. And since it’s our trash, time consuming and, sometimes, disgusting, we all sort our own trash.

Well, most of us do.

One of my friends is a janitor and sometimes it’s his/her job to clean the offices of the people who run McMurdo Station. Even though one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, the janitor does not get pleasure from sorting the trash of one our station bigwigs. Every desk in this office has its own trashcan, and while most people do sort their own trash, the Dolly Parton of our station (the one with the biggest wig) thinks it’s the janitor’s responsibility to sort thier trash.

Piece by piece s/he has to decide if the Kleenex was used because Dolly has a cold—therefore biowaste or if Dolly used the Kleenex as a napkin for food waste. Is it pizza sauce or blood? Is that a fettuccini alfredo or boogers, s/he places it in biohazard just to be safe.

Like the Bud Light commercial, the janitor first approached the situation by going too light. S/he would simply pretend there was not a trashcan in Dolly’s office. After a few days of missing trash pick up, Dolly then set the garbage in the middle of the room as if to say, “You’re my bitch—sort my trash.”

The next time I saw the janitor, I asked about the trash and s/he said, “I went heavy.” Before taking out Dolly’s trash, s/he cleaned the bathroom. There were pubic hairs on the urinal and brown splatters on the toilet. But with an eye for detail and a penchant for cleanliness, the janitor did his/her job. When s/he got to Dolly’s office, s/he noticed the keyboard on Dolly’s desk and computer were dirty. Dirt is not acceptable to a janitor. This is the reason s/he is in Antarctica. With the rag covered in Lysol and pubic hair from the bathroom, the janitor wiped Dolly’s desk and keyboard clean. And, for the first time, sorted another man’s trash as though it were a treasure.