Trash (or, the the 13-day, 485-mile journey of three corroded AA batteries)

December 17

I’m looking for a pencil in the zip-top tote bag where I keep my important paperwork and office supplies. I don’t find a pencil, but I do find three AA batteries with an expiration date of 2018. All three of them are corroded, and two are bulging slightly.

I put the batteries in a plastic grocery bag and tie the top. I know that battery acid is Bad For You, but I’m unclear on how it works. Do batteries go bad like spinach, where one day you’ll notice a greenish liquid collecting in the bottom of the bag? Or is it not even a liquid at all, but more of a gel or goo? I imagine it leaking out onto the floor where it will burn the dog’s paws.

I tuck the bag on the floor behind the passenger seat, next to a cardboard box of recyclables. The box once held a pair of wireless headphones that I ordered online and picked up last time I was at my mailing address in Colorado. Now it holds a plastic container from the poke bowl place, a plastic soda cup from a gas station, glass jars, a few energy drink and beer cans, and a sheaf of junk mail.

When I’m near a friend’s or family member’s house, getting rid of my normal trash and recycling is easy—I just ask permission to use their trash can and recycling bin. But when I’m not visiting someone at their home, it can get tricky. Public parks have trash cans, but they generally have holes or baffles to limit what can be stuffed in there—and my four-gallon trash bags won’t fit without a conspicuous struggle. Alley dumpsters are convenient in large cities, but they don’t exist in the smaller towns where I spend the most time. And just as one cannot simply walk into Mordor, one cannot simply throw a trash bag into a private business’s dumpster. They’re usually locked, and they sometimes have “NO DUMPING” signs, or signs announcing the presence of video cameras. Sometimes big-box stores have trash cans in the parking lot, but not always. It kind of burns when I have to shop at Walmart, and I unpack my groceries and put them away while parked in the Walmart lot, but I have to drive elsewhere to throw away the packaging.

Far more often than I like, I’ve shoved a full trash bag into the tissue-box-sized hole in the top of a gas station trash can, furtively glancing around to make sure that no one is watching. I feel bad for the gas station employees: I assume that the presence of vanlifers and RV people mean that the employees have to empty the trash cans more often, adding annoyance and stress for people who don’t get paid enough as is.

I’d be willing to drive my trash and recycling to an actual dump. But those places almost always either charge fees that are steep by my standards, are limited to county residents, or both. The county where I legally reside (Jefferson County, Colorado) charges at least $40 to dump anything at the landfill. The landfill in the county where I grew up (Anne Arundel, Maryland) is free of charge but only for county residents. There are only two places that I know of where, as a non-local, you can drive in for free and toss a single bag of trash: Pahrump, Nevada, and Quartzsite, Arizona. Both of these areas have huge winter snowbird populations.

But today I am in Taos, New Mexico. There aren’t many winter snowbirds, but with a population of almost 7,000, it’s a pretty sizable town for the region. And it’s kind of a hippie town, with shops that sell healing crystals, an organic honey store, and earthship homes made out of adobe and old tires. I’m hopeful to find someplace where I can recycle these stupid batteries sometime in the next few busy days.

December 18

I’ve been running a ton of errands, and I have to step around the plastic bag of batteries every time I get in or out of the van. In a moment of downtime, I type “battery recycling” into Google Maps.

It returns a solid handful of places to buy batteries, both automotive and household: auto parts stores, hardware stores. There’s also the municipal landfill, so I click on that. The landfill is open only to county residents, and it doesn’t say anything about recycling batteries.

Time for a web search instead. I get a hit, right at the top of the page: the Taos County website has a page titled “Batteries”! I click, and I learn that the county recycles vehicle batteries and lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, but not alkaline batteries, and not batteries that are leaking.

For my leaking alkaline batteries, it tells me:

“For single-use batteries or leaking batteries: It is currently legal, though not ideal, to dispose of alkaline batteries in the trash. Some single-use batteries, such as coin or button cell, contain lithium primary and should be recycled if possible. This can be done through Call2Recycle, an industry-sponsored non-profit battery recycler. It accepts all types of batteries, including single-use batteries and damaged batteries (in special containers). It does this with prepaid mailers, which is your only cost. These range from small boxes to drums. See https://www.call2recycle.org/store/.”

The “legal, though not ideal” line feels like a dig. I want to do the ideal thing! And sure, ordering a prepaid mailer would be a fine solution if I had a fixed address, but I don’t.

It’s estimated that there are over three million people in the U.S. living in vehicles. That’s almost 1% of the population that has a hard time disposing of their trash and recycling in the “ideal” way. I imagine this problem goes beyond nomads, though. What about people whose parents aren’t nearby and are in declining health? If a parent moves into assisted living or dies, the grown child needs to come and take care of all their parent’s stuff. There’s usually a ticking clock: the grown child can only take a week off from work, or the home needs to be ready for the next renters or put up for sale ASAP. This person is probably very stressed and sad and and moving at top speed to get everything done. They aren’t going to have the bandwidth to plan ahead and make sure they order the prepaid battery mailer early in the cleanout process so they can be sure it will arrive in time. They have bigger things to worry about: furniture that family members don’t want, sentimental items that someone might want, closets full of clothes, filing cabinets full of documents. Those batteries are going in the trash.

The ticking clock has also been a factor for basically everyone I know who has moved from one cheap rental apartment to another. To avoid paying rent for someplace where you’re not living, you try and get your move-in date and your move-out date as close together as possible and condense your move into a week or less. You drive carloads of stuff across town to your new place in the evenings after work, and you stay up late packing and cleaning. Here again, there’s no time to wait a week for a battery mailer.

I used to wonder about those people who throw a whole mattress into a wooded ravine or dump an old mini-fridge and a set of beat-up chairs in the desert. On some level I thought they must be amoral and depraved. How could such monsters walk among us looking like normal people? But now I see more desperation than depravity.

I can borrow my cousin’s truck to help move the furniture, but I have to bring it back on Sunday night.

The landlord says mom’s place needs to be empty by the 31st or we’ll have to pay for another month.

At least I have the luxury of time, with my one little box and one little bag. Moving on, I see another promising-looking website, therecycleguide.org. “We partner with local recycling centers,” it says, and there’s a phone number. But the information is purely generic, about different categories of objects that *theoretically* could be recycled, like computers, cell phones, TVs. No information about what these local recycling centers actually are, what they take. It’s implied that this service, whatever it is, probably charges a fee, but there’s no information about that either. I guess that this website is a scam designed to get people to call the number. For this to be a worthwhile scam, a lot of people must be Googling, “how to recycle [ insert object here ] in [ insert town here ].”

A friend who once worked for a city sheriff’s department told me that sometimes people would run an electronics recycling hustle. They’d get a cheap old utility trailer on craigslist, park it somewhere they wouldn’t be bothered, and advertise that they were doing electronic waste collection. Residents could drop off their hard-to-dispose-of old TV sets for only $20. Once the trailer was full, the “recyclers” would drive away with a fistful of twenties and leave the loaded trailer behind. The sheriff’s department was ultimately responsible for the cleanup.

The kicker is that those TVs actually did end up being properly recycled—although it ended up involving the use of law enforcement resources and probably substantial cost.

I skim through the rest of the search results page, which all look like either a) legit but high-cost paid services, b) more scams, or c) AI-generated slop. I’m not going to be able to recycle these batteries in Taos. But I’m visiting a friend in Santa Fe in a couple of days. It’s a bigger town, so maybe I’ll have better luck.

December 21

As it turns out, I did not have time during my Santa Fe visit to find a place for the batteries. My friend said that I was welcome to use her recycling bin, although for some reason the city didn’t pick up glass. To get rid of my whole box of recyclables, I could drive to the free transfer station a couple miles away.

I gladly did this and was happy to be rid of the box. Now I’m driving north, planning to get to metro Denver by nighttime. The dog has a vet appointment the next morning, and then it’s Holiday Time. My parents are flying in from Maryland, hosted by my brother and sister-in-law, who live in the south suburbs. There are dinner plans, brunch plans, Christmas morning plans. I still need to buy presents for my nephews. There are some friends I’d like to see. The batteries are still in the grocery bag behind the passenger seat where I have to step around them while getting in or out of the van.

In Trinidad, Colorado, I pull into a gas station. Almost every pump is occupied. People are on the move today, making the trek north or south on I-25 to get wherever they’re going for Christmas.

The gas station is large and newish, the parking lot not yet coated with drips of oil and splatters of grime. It seems pretty well maintained. The buckets of windshield washer fluid are full, and the trash cans are not overflowing. But next to a couple of the trash cans are empty plastic jugs that once held DEF, diesel exhaust fluid. They rattle in the stiff wind. A good gust will whip them across the parking lot and out onto the plains unless one of the underpaid employees comes out of the busy convenience store and picks it up.

DEF is part of modern emission-reduction systems for diesel vehicles. It’s been around since about 2010 for heavy-duty diesel trucks, and it was phased in for lighter-duty vehicles like pickup trucks and vans. DEF itself is a good thing, since it reduces the most harmful elements of diesel exhaust, but it has also generated a new abundance of plastic trash. The vehicles that need it need a lot of it: a diesel Mercedes Sprinter, the archetypal Instagram Vanlife Van, needs almost a gallon every 200 miles. Some fancy gas stations have pumps for DEF, a small nozzle right next to the nozzle for diesel fuel, but most don’t. Mostly, it’s sold in 2.5 gallon plastic jugs. I have never seen a gas station trash can big enough for these jugs to fit into. And I have never seen a recycling bin at a gas station, period.

A driver traveling from Albuquerque to Denver for the holidays would probably consume one jug of DEF en route. Ideally, they would place it in the back seat until they reach their destination, then put it in the recycling bin at grandma’s house. (I hope those jugs are recyclable, but I’m actually not sure.)

But say you have your partner, two children, a dog, four humans’ luggage, the dog’s food, and presents for your nieces and nephews and grandma all packed into your quad-cab pickup. You are not going to ask your oldest child to hold the empty DEF jug on their lap for the next 260 miles, especially since who knows what is in that stuff and your youngest child still touches everything and then puts their hands in their mouth. You are going to put the empty DEF jug next to the trash can and hope that one of the underpaid employees will pick it up before it blows away.

From a resource and environmental perspective, this is definitely a problem. People have to buy this stuff in containers, and there’s no way to dispose of the containers at the point of use. But it’s not a problem from the perspective of the manufacturer or vendor. You bought the container of stuff; it’s your problem now. If you want it not to blow onto the plains and spend the next thousand years breaking down into microplastics, then you figure it out.

Sometimes when I’m driving, I’ll think of all these great businesses that I would start if only I had the actual skill, knowledge, and money to run them. Some recent ones include:

An iodine-free dairy farm that makes cheese for people with thyroid cancer.

A dating app with no swiping and no algorithms, just a text search so you can find people who share your favorite authors or weird interests.

But a surprising amount of my ideas kind of relate to trash:

A company that builds modular homes out of decommissioned fiberglass windmill blades.

Or the one that uses recycled aluminum cans to make packaging for other foods: peanuts, candy, chips. This company would be called Yes We Can.

Or the one that builds camera, computer, and conveyor-belt systems to sort trash. The software could be trained to recognize common shapes and materials, then use railroad-track-type switches to shunt each item into the appropriate branching conveyor belt for additional sorting and recycling.

Of course, in my trash fantasies, I don’t have to worry about making any of these things commercially viable. In my fantasy world, taxes on large-scale food producers subsidize nationwide programs for the collection and recycling of food packaging. Gas stations that sell DEF also have recycling bins for the jugs, and that plastic recycling is picked up by local municipalities because recycling whenever and whatever possible is viewed as an essential civic responsibility, kind of like wastewater treatment plants.

In the real world, the three corroded AA batteries are still behind the passenger seat. On a straight and uncrowded stretch of I-25, I try a Google search again, and again I see plenty of places to buy batteries but nowhere “ideal” to throw them out.

December 30

Christmas has come and gone. At my brother’s house, the trash cans and recycling bins have filled, were emptied, and are filling again. I have left my brother’s house in the suburbs and moved on to Denver. The batteries have remained in the grocery bag behind the passenger seat.

A few months ago, I helped a friend clean out her garage. This is the same friend who once worked for the sheriff’s department and who told me about the fake electronics recycling hustle. She had some of the usual accumulated debris of life in a sizable old house: cans of paint, half-full containers of old household chemicals like paint stripper and old antifreeze and oven cleaner, dead fluorescent light bulbs, broken remote controls and obsolete electronic cables. My friend is a highly ethical person who wanted to recycle whatever she could and dispose of anything un-recyclable or toxic responsibly. We drove the paint to a paint store that would take it. We took the electronics to a computer shop 25 minutes away that said, front and center on their website, that they take in old computers, cables, batteries, and almost everything except old tube TVs, for free.

But the hazardous chemicals were tough. We found services that would take it for a steep fee. Her county usually offered free hazardous household chemical pickup, but the website said that the city had exceeded its 2025 toxic waste pickup budget in June, so no more pickup until 2026. My county of official residence could take it at a special recycling center—but the center is by appointment only, and the only open dates were weeks away. I was scheduled to leave town long before that.

The rows of bottles took up valuable real estate on the garage floor. I got so frustrated that I suggested that maybe we should just throw that stuff in the trash. Almost everyone does throw this kind of stuff in the trash. But my friend, to her credit, said she would wait for the new year.

I remember the computer shop that took my friend’s old cables and remote controls. In a break in between errands and work, I drive down there. At this point, I have more electronic waste to get rid of because I accidentally snapped the data cable for my satellite dish.

It’s a 14-mile round trip from central Denver to the computer shop and back. I finally disposed of the batteries in the ideal way, but I burned a gallon of gas to do it. Between carbon emissions and battery acid leaking into the landfill, I don’t know which side of the equation is heavier.