toxic waste at home
Well, the other day I finally got around to clearing one shelf in the garage of our inherited pesticides. Seems that Ralph, our home's previous owner–and the only owner this house had had from since 1961–was quite the creature of mid-century Progress. He believed in spraying his flowers and fruit trees, and had the collection of bottles and
Some of this stuff looked like it had been on the shelf for decades. I was curious about a word I'd not seen before, but was on several of the labels: diazinon. Turns out it was banned by the EPA for all residential use in 2004. You know a chemical's gotta be pretty toxic to be banned under the Bush administration.
And then there were several jars of who know's what, simply labeled 'fruit tree spray.' I shudder to think.
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Come to think of it, at the waste drop-off facility they had a small shed filled with orphaned household chemicals that were still good and could taken for free. It was quite orderly and seemed like a ready-made art installation. The part I left out of the post was that I came home with somebody else's chemical headaches. I mean, I couldn't just leave those beige, lilac, and biscuit spray paints there now, could I?