David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published Aug. 19, 2003

How much trash did you buy today?

Have you ever wondered how much money you spend on trash? I'm not talking about Ginsu knives, the Popeil Pocket Fisherman or that $11 plastic action figure that your son just had to have which is now residing in the cat's litter pan because he quit playing with it two days after you bought it. I'm talking about stinky, foul, useless, disgusting, unwanted trash.

I find trash fascinating. We buy our trash -- you know that, right? The majority of everything in your trash can was purchased by you. You chose it, you paid for it, you took it home, you used it, and then you threw it away. Today's trash is yesterday's hot buy.

Much of our purchased trash is in the form of product packaging. I suspect that when you buy a can of soda, for instance, at least half of the cost is for the can itself, not the soda. I don't have any hard figures to back up my theory, and the soda companies aren't about to provide a per-unit cost analysis for some smarty-pants hack like me. That being said, I feel confident in my guesstimate.

The can is a required part of the deal, but it's not anything you actually want, is it? All you're interested in is the pennies' worth of soda, and yet you're also on the hook for a useless, empty can long after the last burp has crossed your lips. You don't want the can, and yet it's a necessary part of the transaction. The soda company needs the can in order to get the soda to you, and you need the can, at least temporarily, to consume the soda. Without a can, the soda company would have to drive around town using a garden hose to spray soda directly into our mouths. Sure, you wouldn't be stuck with an empty can, but it wouldn't be the most enjoyable way to enjoy a soda, now would it? Well, actually, perhaps it would.

There you are, the proud owner of an empty soda can. After all, you bought it. No one forced you, and yet you now have something you don't want, despite the fact you plunked down your hard-earned money for it.

So now what do you do with it? You could throw it out of your car window as you inch your roadster's speedometer past the 60 mph mark in front of the elementary school, but that would be illegal -- in so many ways. Strike that idea.

You could take it to the local recycling center, but that applies to only a handful of materials like aluminum, certain plastics, cardboard and a few others. What about your empty Wonderbread bag? Or how about your big bag of soiled kitty litter? Not to mention all that used dental floss that piles up in a big, big hurry. What are we going to do with all this junk?

Easy. We buy something else. In this case, we buy a service. We pay guys in blue jumpsuits to come to our house and haul away our junk -- junk that we paid someone else for, mind you. That is what makes capitalism great! See an opening in the marketplace and fill it. Capitalism abhors a vacuum.

I've often thought that if I had a lot of investment capital, I'd look into owning a garbage company. It seems like one of the few enterprises in the world that will always be with us. People are never going to stop buying stuff and then throwing it away. It's also a business in which the customers don't expect too much. "Just take my trash on the same day, once a week. That's all I ask." If you can do that, you'll have paying customers. If you can do it cheaper than the other garbage company in town, you'll have lots of paying customers. Like I said, I really don't know anything about running a garbage company, but I have seen The Sopranos once or twice. I'll bet I could make it work.

Garbage may be the perfect business for me. Some would say it already is.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.